Dartmouth Events

Elected officials discriminate against African Americans. Is this behavior a departure or an alignment with what their constituents want them to do and would, in fact, do themselves if given the chance? In this article, we present the results from a novel new large-scale field experimental technique designed to benchmark levels of racial bias among elected officials to the constituents they serve. We conducted the first correspondence study on a pool of randomly-drawn citizens and paired that with the largest correspondence study of public officials to date. Our within-subjects experimental design tested the public's and their elected officials' responsiveness to simple informational requests from either an ostensibly black or an ostensibly white sender. We find three major results from this study. First, the public is quite biased against African Americans, with white and other minority groups discriminating solely on the basis of race. Second, the public is just as racially biased in their response patterns as elected officials. This suggests that democracy is working---in a very perverse way with very negative consequences---when elected officials discriminate on the basis of race and that democracy may realize outcomes that perpetuate long-lasting social inequalities. Third, we observe our measure of racial discrimination does not correlate with other measures, and that the location and nature of racial discrimination has been mislocated in previous studies of racial animus.