Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

Publication Title

Theory and Society

Keywords

racialization, race, spillover, racial resentment, Supreme Court

Abstract

Analyses assessing whether a particular phenomenon has been racialized often use only one measure of racial attitudes at a time. However, simultaneous use of independent measures of attitudes about more than one relevant racial group can produce a better understanding about the nature of racialization. To illustrate this, an analysis of American National Election Studies data indicated that, among White adult U.S. citizens in 2020, ratings about the U.S. Supreme Court associated with racial resentment and with the difference in feeling thermometer ratings about Whites and Blacks. But when these feeling thermometer ratings were included in the same analysis as separate measures, ratings about the U.S. Supreme Court substantially associated with ratings about Whites but did not associate at p <  0.05 with ratings about Blacks. These results suggest that analyses into the spillover of group-based attitudes should include independent measures about more than one relevant group, which will help prevent bias in inferences about the targets of prejudice.

Funding Source

The ANES 2020 Time Series Study, which contains the data from the ANES Cumulative Data File that was used, was funded by National Science Foundation grant numbers SES-1835721 to the University of Michigan and SES-1835022 to Stanford University. However, for this study, the author did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. This article was published open access thanks to a transformative agreement between Milner Library and Springer Nature.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.1007/s11186-026-09752-5

Comments

First published in Theory and Society (2026): https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-026-09752-5

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