2002. “Sophistication and the antecedents of whites’ racial policy attitudes: Racism, ideology, and affirmative action in America.” Public Opinion Quarterly 66

Abstract A number of researchers have argued that the effects of prejudice on the racial policy attitudes and general political beliefs of white Americans may be restricted to the poorly educated and politically unsophisticated. In contrast, rather than being motivated by prejudice, the racial policy attitudes and ideological values of the politically so-phisticated white Americans should be more firmly informed and mo-tivated by the tolerant values at the heart of American political culture. These values include such things as individualism, notions of fair play, and devotion to the principle of equality of opportunity. We tested this hypothesis using white respondents from the 1986 and 1992 National Election Studies. Our evidence generally indicated that racial policy attitudes and political ideology were more powerfully associated with ideologies of racial dominance and superiority among politically so-phisticated white Americans than among political unsophisticated white Americans. Moreover, even among the sophisticated, we found that various forms of egalitarianism predicted support for—rather than op-position to—affirmative action and that support for equal opportunity is not uniformly distributed across the political spectrum. Studies of the momentous changes in public opinion that accompanied the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s have generally reached a common christopher m. federico is assistant professor of psychology and political science at the Uni-versity of Minnesota, Twin Cities. jim sidanius is professor of psychology and political scienc