How Framing Affects Attitudes Toward Welfare Programs

Privilege on the Precipice:
Perceived Racial Status Threats Lead White Americans to Oppose Welfare Programs

Rachel Wetts, University of California, Berkeley
Robb Willer, Stanford University

ABSTRACT

Here we integrate prior work to develop and test a theory of how perceived macro-level trends in racial standing shape whites’ views of welfare policy. We argue that when whites perceive threats to their relative advantage in the racial status hierarchy, their resentment of minorities increases. This increased resentment in turn leads whites to withdraw support for welfare programs when they perceive these programs to primarily benefit minorities. Analysis of American National Election Studies data and two survey-embedded experiments support this reasoning. In Study 1, we find whites’ racial resentment increased beginning in 2008, the year of Barack Obama’s successful presidential candidacy and a major economic downturn, the latter a factor previously shown to amplify racial threat effects. At the same time, whites’ opposition to welfare increased relative to minorities’. In Study 2, we sought to better establish the causal effect of racial status threats. We found that experimentally presenting information suggesting that the white majority is rapidly declining increased whites’ opposition to welfare, and this effect was mediated by heightened racial resentment. Finally, in Study 3 we found that threatening whites’ sense of their economic advantage over minorities led whites to report greater opposition to welfare programs, but only if these programs were portrayed as primarily benefiting minorities, not if they were portrayed as benefiting whites. These findings suggest that whites’ perceptions that minorities’ standing is rising can produce periods of “welfare backlash” in which adoption of policies restricting or curtailing welfare programs is more likely.

We demonstrate that the relationship between racial resentment and welfare opposition remains robust even in the post-welfare reform era, when benefits have been reduced significantly and are subject to stringent sanctions (Soss et al. 2011).

Finally, by examining how salient events may lead to perceptions of racial status threat among whites, we provide evidence for a social psychological mechanism promoting the durability of racial inequality through individuals’ political responses. Because status rank is hierarchical and zero-sum, any increases in economic or political power of lower-status groups can be interpreted as a threat to the relative standing of dominant group members. Thus, any progress toward equality may provoke resentment on the part of dominant group members, who may react politically in ways that undermine or even reverse progress to racial equality. In the case of American social welfare programs, this further implies that evidence of increased racial equality could exacerbate overall economic inequality. As whites attempt to undermine racial progress they see as threatening their group’s status, they increase opposition to programs intended to benefit poorer members of all racial groups.

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