Childhood cross-ethnic exposure predicts political behavior seven decades later: evidence from linked administrative data
Date
2021-06
Authors
Brown, Jacob R.
Enos, Ryan D.
Feigenbaum, James
Mazumder, Soumyajit
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
J.R. Brown, R.D. Enos, J. Feigenbaum, S. Mazumder. 2021. "Childhood cross-ethnic exposure predicts political behavior seven decades later: Evidence from linked administrative data.." Sci Adv, Volume 7, Issue 24, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abe8432
Abstract
Does contact across social groups influence sociopolitical behavior? This question is among the most studied in the social sciences with deep implications for the harmony of diverse societies. Yet, despite a voluminous body of scholarship, evidence around this question is limited to cross-sectional surveys that only measure short-term consequences of contact or to panel surveys with small samples covering short time periods. Using advances in machine learning that enable large-scale linkages across datasets, we examine the long-term determinants of sociopolitical behavior through an unprecedented individual-level analysis linking contemporary political records to the 1940 U.S. Census. These linked data allow us to measure the exact residential context of nearly every person in the United States in 1940 and, for men, connect this with the political behavior of those still alive over 70 years later. We find that, among white Americans, early-life exposure to black neighbors predicts Democratic partisanship over 70 years later.
Description
License
Copyright © 2021 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited.