Replication Data for: Racial Attitudes through A Partisan Lens

The conventional wisdom is that racial attitudes, by forming through early socialization processes, are causally prior to most things political, including whites’ party identifications. Yet, a broad literature demonstrates that partisanship can shape mass attitudes. I argue that this influence extends even to presumptively fundamental predispositions like racial attitudes. Applying cross-lagged models to panel data from the 1990s and 2000s, I demonstrate that whites align their racial attitudes with their party loyalties. Partisanship’s influence is more pronounced in the latter time period, results consistent with a view that changes in the political context can make partisanship a more likely causal force on other attitudes. Racial concerns not only provide a foundation for political conflict, but my results reveal that political processes can actually increase or decrease racial animus.