Journal ArticleDOI
Whites' Opposition to “Busing”: Self-interest or Symbolic Politics?*
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The authors compared the self-interest and symbolic politics explanations for the formation of mass policy preferences and voting behavior, and concluded that selfinterest is often overestimated as a determinant of public opinion and voting behaviour because it is too rarely directly assessed empirically.Abstract:
This article contrasts the “self-interest” and “symbolic politics” explanations for the formation of mass policy preferences and voting behavior. Self-interested attitudes are defined as those supporting policies that would maximize benefits and minimize costs to the individual's private material well-being. The “symbolic politics” model emphasizes pressures to make adulthood attitudes consistent with the residues of preadult socialization. We compare the two models in terms of their ability to account for whites' opposition to busing school children for racial integration of the public schools, and the role of the busing issue in presidential voting decisions, using the 1972 Center for Political Studies election study. Regression analysis shows strong effects of symbolic attitudes (racial intolerance and political conservatism) on opposition to busing, and of the busing issue on presidential voting decisions. Self-interest (e.g., having children susceptible to busing) had no significant effect upon either. It is concluded that self-interest is often overestimated as a determinant of public opinion and voting behavior because it is too rarely directly assessed empirically.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Prejudice and politics: Symbolic racism versus racial threats to the good life.
Donald R. Kinder,David O. Sears +1 more
TL;DR: For example, this article found that white suburban whites' voting behavior in two mayoral elections in Los Angeles, both strongly influenced by racial issues, matched the same two candidates, one black and one white.
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Psychological status of the script concept.
TL;DR: The authors suggest that there has been growing interest within several subfields of psychology in the schematic nature of mental representations of real-world objects and events, and present a simple form of schema is the "script", embodying knowledge of stereotyped event sequences.
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Perceptions of racial group competition: Extending Blumer's theory of group position to a multiracial social context
TL;DR: This paper used data from the 1992 Los Angeles County Social Survey, a large multiracial sample of the general population, to analyze the distribution and social and psychological underpinnings of perceived group competition.
Journal ArticleDOI
Prejudice against fat people: ideology and self-interest.
TL;DR: Fatism appears to behave much like symbolic racism, but with less of the negative social desirability of racism, and three commonalities between antifat attitudes and racism were explored.
References
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Book
An Economic Theory of Democracy
TL;DR: Downs presents a rational calculus of voting that has inspired much of the later work on voting and turnout as discussed by the authors, particularly significant was his conclusion that a rational voter should almost never bother to vote.
Journal ArticleDOI
The American Voter
Journal ArticleDOI
The functional approach to the study of attitudes
TL;DR: In the psychological level, the reasons for holding or for changing attitudes are found in the functions they perform for the individual, specifically the functions of adjustment, ego defense, value expression, and knowledge as discussed by the authors.
Book
The effects of mass communication
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the effects of mass communication on social and psychological effects of media content, and propose a primitive theoretical scheme which is further discussed at various other explicitly labeled places in the book.
Book
Political Control of the Economy
TL;DR: Tufte, a political scientist who covered the 1976 U.S. presidential election for "Newsweek" as mentioned in this paper, provided an eyeopening view of the impact of political life on the national economy of America and other capitalist democracies.
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Prejudice and politics: Symbolic racism versus racial threats to the good life.
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