ALERT: This system is being upgraded on Tuesday December 12. It will not be available
for use for several hours that day while the upgrade is in progress. Deposits to DukeSpace
will be disabled on Monday December 11, so no new items are to be added to the repository
while the upgrade is in progress. Everything should be back to normal by the end of
day, December 12.
Impact of Racial Resentment on Public Opinion of Voter ID Laws
Abstract
Voter identification laws in the United States are a controversial and often misunderstood
issue. Previous research has found that public opinion of voter identification laws
is influenced by views of race and racial framing. This paper builds off this research
and tests whether support for voter ID laws among White voters with higher levels
of racial resentment increases when such policies are framed in racial terms. Using
an experiment embedded in an original survey, I find that when White voters with strong
levels of racial resentment are informed that voter ID laws disproportionately impact
Black voters, their levels of support for such laws increase significantly. These
Whites also become more likely to report that voter fraud is a problem, and more likely
to report favorable evaluations of Donald Trump, who has repeatedly suggested that
voter fraud was a problem in the 2016 presidential election. These findings support
the hypothesis that although voter ID laws are ostensibly race-neutral, the public
perceives them as racialized. This suggests important considerations for the way such
laws are framed and discussed.
Type
Honors thesisDepartment
Political SciencePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/14253Citation
Jensen, Izzy (2017). Impact of Racial Resentment on Public Opinion of Voter ID Laws. Honors thesis, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/14253.Collections
More Info
Show full item record
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Rights for Collection: Undergraduate Honors Theses and Student papers
Works are deposited here by their authors, and represent their research and opinions, not that of Duke University. Some materials and descriptions may include offensive content. More info