Institute for the Study of Societal Issues

By treating criminal justice ballot propositions as race-implicit policies that disproportionately harm racial minorities, this article explores the hypothesis that a change in social context increases support for punitive criminal justice policies. To do so, it draws on insights from two related specifications of Social Identity Theory: Racial Threat Hypothesis and Contact Theory. The analysis offers two methodological innovations: first, it uses longitudinal rather than cross-sectional data to more precisely capture the effect of individuals’ experience; second, it draws upon a broader conceptualization of social context that includes not only racial composition of a county, but SES and education. The primary finding is that change in income and education levels by race/ethnicity and county-level political affiliation are significant predictors of support for race-implicit policies. The article concludes with a proposal for a mid-range theory of political behavior that takes into account the power of implicit messages about race in the political domain.