March 22, 2015
by Sean Mcelwee
The rightwing media's true influence: (click here) Racial resentment is the "strongest predictor" of welfare spending in America
Progressives have long argued that conservatives play up racial resentments to undermine the welfare state. Conservatives tend to respond to such accusations with their own charges of liberal “race baiting.” But whatever right-wing voices might say on the matter, a new analysis of the data suggests that racism does, in fact, strongly predict welfare spending.
Using two surveys from 2008, Douglas Spencer and Christopher Elmendorf estimated racial resentment across the states by measuring responses to questions about the work ethic, intelligence and trustworthiness of blacks Americans. They estimate the portion of whites in each state that are in the top quartile of racial resentment (so a state with large amounts of racism would have more than 25 percent of whites espousing racially biased views).
I combined this with data
from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities showing Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families benefits for a single-parent household of
three. As the scatterplot below shows, these two variables are strongly
correlated:......Stone tells me that after controlling for these factors, “racial resentment is indeed the strongest predictor of TANF, at least in the context of this model.” He reports a p-value of <.001 (indicating there is a less than .1 percent chance that the relationship was observed by chance) and an R2 of .556 for the model (meaning that these variables collectively explain more than half of the variation in TANF spending)....
