Racial Resentment and Support for Labor

• In Event: Labor, Identity, and Intergroup Relations

Abstract

The decline in labor union density has been a primary factor in the increasing pay inequity across the United States, and Americans consistently show that they are acutely aware of this increasing income gap. However, support for labor unions has remained relatively unchanged over time, failing to increase with rising income inequality. Many studies have noted that the racialization of nonracial political policies overtime has resulted in decreased support for those policies among people with high levels of racial resentment. However, among these studies, none has assessed the role of racial resentment in public support for labor unions, and this project is the first to explore this relationship. In this article, I develop a theory of racialized unions. Further, through fixed effects, interaction, and regression discontinuity methods, I leverage data from the ANES and GSS between 1986 and 2020 to present strong evidence that racial resentment has increasingly become a powerful predictor of support for labor unions over time. Finally, I supplement these findings with a survey experiment to reveal the impact of a racial frame on public support for labor unions.

Author

• Kendrick Roberson, Pepperdine University