The Political Psychology of Race

As both everyday experience and a wealth of social-scientific data attest, race continues to play an important role in conditioning not only individuals’ life outcomes, but also their social and political attitudes (Dawson, 1994; Kinder & Winter, 2001; Sears, Hetts, Sidanius, & Bobo, 2000; Tate, 1993). In particular, it is clear that identifications and preferences often thought of as purely “political” have become increasingly saturated with racial meaning (Carmines & Stimson, 1989; Glaser, 1996; Huckfeldt & Kohfeld, 1989; see also Gilens, 1999; Mendelberg, 2001), and that conflicts between racial groups and conflicts over racial issues have become more and more central to the main axes of political conflict in the United States and other societies. The purpose of this symposium is to bring together the contributions of five young scholars doing important work on the psychological dimensions of the intersection between race and politics. While this nexus also has critical historical and institutional dimensions (Huckfeldt & Kohfeld, 1989; see also Mendelberg, 2001), political psychology is uniquely positioned to analyze the linkage between race and politics. Perhaps the most important contribution of political psychology in this area has to do with matters of social identity—or to be more precise, attachments to racial ingroups and ingroup-related social institutions, on one hand, and resentments toward racial outgroups, on the other (Kinder & Winter, 2001; Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Simply put, a variety of research suggests that racial-group attachments and resentments are primary psychological antecedents of both White and Black Americans’ attitudes toward social policies with explicit and implicit racial content (see Sears, 1988; Sears, Hetts, Sidanius, & Bobo, 2000; see also Gilens, 1999). In turn, identity-related variables may provide an essential link between broad social and historical factors—such as the cultural values of a particular society, or the ways its institutions condition Political Psychology, Vol. 26, No. 5, 2005