IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/socsci/v95y2014i4p1121-1136.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Americans Fill Out President Obama's Census Form: What is His Race?

Author

Listed:
  • Jack Citrin
  • Morris Levy
  • Robert P. Van Houweling

Abstract

type="main"> We use nationally representative survey experiments to assess public opinion about how President Obama should have identified himself racially on the 2010 Census. Respondents were randomly assigned to three conditions—a control, a treatment that described the president's biracial ancestry, and a treatment that combined the biracial ancestry information with a statement that Obama had in fact classified himself as black only. All respondents were then asked how they felt Obama should have filled out his Census form. A clear majority of Americans in all experimental conditions said that Obama should have identified himself as both black and white. There appears to be suggesting robust acceptance of official multiracial identification despite the cultural and legal legacy of the “one drop of blood” rule in official U.S. race categorization. A subsequent survey experiment found that a convenience sample of Americans support multiracial identification for mixed-race individuals generally and not only for the president.

Suggested Citation

  • Jack Citrin & Morris Levy & Robert P. Van Houweling, 2014. "Americans Fill Out President Obama's Census Form: What is His Race?," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 95(4), pages 1121-1136, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:socsci:v:95:y:2014:i:4:p:1121-1136
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/ssqu.12105
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Berinsky, Adam J. & Huber, Gregory A. & Lenz, Gabriel S., 2012. "Evaluating Online Labor Markets for Experimental Research: Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 20(3), pages 351-368, July.
    2. Ray Block Jr., 2011. "Backing Barack Because He's Black: Racially Motivated Voting in the 2008 Election," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 92(2), pages 423-446, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Pan, Jing Yu & Liu, Dahai, 2022. "Mask-wearing intentions on airplanes during COVID-19 – Application of theory of planned behavior model," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 119(C), pages 32-44.
    2. Rebecca R Carter & Analisa DiFeo & Kath Bogie & Guo-Qiang Zhang & Jiayang Sun, 2014. "Crowdsourcing Awareness: Exploration of the Ovarian Cancer Knowledge Gap through Amazon Mechanical Turk," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(1), pages 1-10, January.
    3. Lala Muradova & Ross James Gildea, 2021. "Oil wealth and US public support for war," Conflict Management and Peace Science, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 38(1), pages 3-19, January.
    4. Michele Cantarella & Chiara Strozzi, 2021. "Workers in the crowd: the labor market impact of the online platform economy [An evaluation of instrumental variable strategies for estimating the effects of catholic schooling]," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 30(6), pages 1429-1458.
    5. Robbett, Andrea & Matthews, Peter Hans, 2018. "Partisan bias and expressive voting," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 157(C), pages 107-120.
    6. Brañas-Garza, Pablo & Capraro, Valerio & Rascón-Ramírez, Ericka, 2018. "Gender differences in altruism on Mechanical Turk: Expectations and actual behaviour," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 170(C), pages 19-23.
    7. Logan S. Casey & Jesse Chandler & Adam Seth Levine & Andrew Proctor & Dara Z. Strolovitch, 2017. "Intertemporal Differences Among MTurk Workers: Time-Based Sample Variations and Implications for Online Data Collection," SAGE Open, , vol. 7(2), pages 21582440177, June.
    8. Winter, Scott R. & Rice, Stephen & Rains, Taylor & Milner, Mattie & Mehta, Rian, 2017. "A longitudinal study on the alteration of consumer perceptions and the use of pilot medication," Journal of Air Transport Management, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 100-106.
    9. Damian Clarke & Sonia Oreffice & Climent Quintana‐Domeque, 2021. "On the Value of Birth Weight," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 83(5), pages 1130-1159, October.
    10. Wladislaw Mill & Jonathan Stäbler, 2023. "Spite in Litigation," CESifo Working Paper Series 10290, CESifo.
    11. Aigul Mavletova & James Witte, 2017. "Is the willingness to take risks contagious? A comparison of immigrants and native-born in the United States," Journal of Risk Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(7), pages 827-845, July.
    12. Park, JungKun & Ahn, Jiseon & Thavisay, Toulany & Ren, Tianbao, 2019. "Examining the role of anxiety and social influence in multi-benefits of mobile payment service," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 140-149.
    13. Chunhao Wei & Han Chen & Yee Ming Lee, 2022. "COVID-19 preventive measures and restaurant customers’ intention to dine out: the role of brand trust and perceived risk," Service Business, Springer;Pan-Pacific Business Association, vol. 16(3), pages 581-600, September.
    14. Angela C M de Oliveira & John M Spraggon & Matthew J Denny, 2016. "Instrumenting Beliefs in Threshold Public Goods," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(2), pages 1-15, February.
    15. repec:cup:judgdm:v:11:y:2016:i:1:p:99-113 is not listed on IDEAS
    16. Masha Shunko & Julie Niederhoff & Yaroslav Rosokha, 2018. "Humans Are Not Machines: The Behavioral Impact of Queueing Design on Service Time," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 64(1), pages 453-473, January.
    17. Arash Baghaei Lakeh & Navid Ghaffarzadegan & Luis Luna-Reyes, 2016. "The dual-process theory and understanding of stocks and flows," System Dynamics Review, System Dynamics Society, vol. 32(3-4), pages 309-331, July.
    18. Nathan W. Mecham & Melissa F. Lewis-Western & David A. Wood, 2021. "The Effects of Pornography on Unethical Behavior in Business," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 168(1), pages 37-54, January.
    19. Yoram Halevy & Guy Mayraz, 2024. "Identifying Rule-Based Rationality," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 106(5), pages 1369-1380, September.
    20. Kobayashi, Yoshiharu & Howell, Christopher & Heinrich, Tobias, 2021. "Vaccine hesitancy, state bias, and Covid-19: Evidence from a survey experiment using Phase-3 results announcement by BioNTech and Pfizer," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 282(C).
    21. Jingya Gao & Andisheh Ranjbari & Don MacKenzie, 2019. "Would being driven by others affect the value of travel time? Ridehailing as an analogy for automated vehicles," Transportation, Springer, vol. 46(6), pages 2103-2116, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:socsci:v:95:y:2014:i:4:p:1121-1136. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0038-4941 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.