18
problem - crime.
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One reason that African Americans may be more concerned about welfare
spending is that this group might see this as one strategy to reduce crime. Given African
Americans' special concern about welfare spending, African Americans’ preferences for
spending on welfare may exert influence more equal to that of whites’ preferences than in
other domains.
Racial Differences in Responsiveness
To begin our estimations, we model changes in budget allocations as a function of only
whites’ or African Americans’ spending preferences, along with the controls outlined above.
First, we modeled spending as a function of whites’ spending preferences. Column 1 of Table
1 presents the coefficients and standard errors for whites’ preferences in each of these models
(for full results including controls, see appendix). As column 1 shows, whites’ preferences
were significantly related to spending in 5 of 9 domains—big cities, the environment, health
care, space exploration, and welfare. Defense spending preferences were close to statistical
significance as well (p = .11). In contrast, Afr ican Americans’ preferences were only related
to spending in three areas: big cities, defense, and the environment (see column 2). In one
domain (big cities) the coefficient for African Americans was larger than the coefficient for
whites, in another (defense) the coefficient for whites was larger, and in the third
(environment) the coefficients were nearly equal. Note that in the three domains where
spending is related to African Americans’ preferences, African Americans’ and whites’
preferences are fairly highly correlated, so what appears to be government responsiveness to
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Whites were more likely than African Americans to identify national defense (VCF0875b = 700); the
environment (VCF0875b = 150, 151, 153); and health care (VCF0875b = 40). Neither group was more
likely than the other to mention foreign aid (VCF0875b = 560), education (VCF0875b = 20).
Convention