Exploring Empathy as a Causal Mechanism for Racial Opinion Change in Summer 2020

• In Event: Understanding the Determinants of White Americans' Racial Attitudes

Abstract

Advances in democratic equality in the U.S. have almost always occurred alongside significant shifts in mass opinion, yet political scientists do not have a theoretical framework explaining how these changes in public opinion happen and why they occur at particular moments. Egalitarian shifts in white Americans’ support for civil rights and heterosexual Americans’ support for gay rights cannot be explained by existing theories within political science. Similarly, political scientists lack understanding of how and why the “racial reckoning” of Summer 2020 caused significant egalitarian shifts in public opinion on racial matters. Drawing on the theory of empathy and equality I developed in earlier work, the causal mechanism I propose is the experience of cross-racial empathy. Using data from nationally representative surveys conducted in summer 2020 and spring 2021 and an original survey experiment, I examine the influence of “racial reckoning” narratives and the hypothesized empathy mechanism on understandings of racial inequality and racial policy preferences.

Author

• Erica Czaja, College of the Holy Cross