The Politics of Ableism and Support for Disability Policy

• In Event: Disability Representation and Policy Views

Abstract

Brief overview: Our study is one of the first to construct and validate measures of disability discrimination (ableism) on public opinion surveys. We connect ableism to politically salient characteristics and to support for disability policy.

Proposal: The Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 established certain civil rights for disabled people (e.g., the right to employment, to access public spaces). The ADA was viewed as necessary by the disabled community because of the discrimination disabled people face in all aspects of their lives solely based on their disabilities. This discrimination stems from a combination of affect, behaviors, and cognitions about disabled people as a group, resulting in stereotypes and practices that cast disabled people as inferior to non-disabled people. This is called ableism, a type of discrimination that has received little attention from political scientists even though disability discrimination is pervasive across political and social fault lines. Our paper is one of the first attempts to construct validated measures of ableism in the mass public. We present our findings from pilot surveys using these measures. We then show the overlap between ableism and politically salient variables such as party identification and ideology. Finally, we assess the predictive capacity of ableism in a series of models assessing public support for disability policy in line with provisions of the ADA. Our findings show that discrimination towards disabled people appears in a variety of ways, some more and less obvious, and that these discriminatory views are held by individuals across the political spectrum.

Keywords: disability, ableism, discrimination, political psychology, public opinion, policy

Authors

• Rachel Blum, University of Oklahoma

• Monica C. Schneider, Miami University