NPR reported this morning on the findings of an experiment conducted by Christian Grose, a political scientist at the University of Southern California, and graduate student Matthew Mendez, to see if state legislators were equally responsive to their constituents.
In recent years, social scientists have tried to find out whether important decisions are shaped by subtle biases. They've studied recruiters as they decide whom to hire. They've studied teachers, deciding which students to help at school. And they've studied doctors, figuring out what treatments to give patients. Now, researchers have trained their attention on a new group of influential people — state legislators.
Follow below the fold for details on their study and what they found.
The researchers conducted their experiment in 14 states with high Latino populations, and began by sending emails to 1,871 legislators. Some emails came from a "constituent" named Jacob Smith while others came from a Santiago Rodriguez. Both emails contained the same message asking the politicians what documentation they needed to vote.
"No one had really looked at sort of what underlies legislator behavior," Grose says. "Is there the possibility that legislators' own biases regarding race and ethnicity might rear their heads and that legislators might ignore Latino constituents more than white constituents?"
Hmmmm?
Latino constituents were less likely than Anglo constituents to receive communications from legislators. The implication is that discriminatory intent underlies legislative support for voter identification laws.
No!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And looking at the results even closer they found Democrats responded about the same to both names, but it was Republicans who were more likely to respond to the man with Anglo name rather than the Latino name.
Surprise, surprise!
Next they examined whether Republicans in those states sponsored or co-sponsored voter ID laws and found a very strong correlation between those who ignored the emails from the Latino voter and those who had sponsored these laws. It is important to note that the differential in response to Latino voters was not so much between Democrats and Republicans as it was between Republicans who did not support voter ID laws and Republicans who did support them.
"Republicans who support voter identification are different than those Republicans who did not support voter identification," Grose says. "Among those Republicans who did support voter ID laws, the Latino constituent was very unlikely to receive a response from their elected official. The difference was almost 40 percentage points, which is just one of the largest gaps I have ever seen."
Dr Grose was careful to point out that these findings were not proof that the Republican bias is what caused them to support voter ID laws, but the correlation was strong. "That might be an inference, that might be a correlation, but it's not a proven fact," he said.
This study doesn't really tell most of us (yes, I am including myself) well informed people with a brain and a modicum of common sense anything we didn't already know, but it is nice to have the scientific data to use as ammunition against the forces of darkness who are out to destroy our democracy.
6:55 PM PT: As most of us know much of this behavior is not "subconscious" but in the radio interview I listened to this morning Grose made the point that this experiment was designed to detect bias in people who did not believe they were biased. It seemed he was very careful not to make the claim that these legislators were overtly biased. I leave it, as he probably intended, to the reader to draw that conclusion.