Working Paper, 2024
Moving Beyond Linked Fate: A New Measure of Politicized Racial Identity
by Kaiyla Banks, Jeron Fenton, Jasanté Howard, Isaiah Johnson,
Burcu Kolcak, LaFleur Stephens-Dougan, Ismail White
Linked fate, the perception that due to historical and contemporary experiences of group disadvantage and discrimination, one’s life chances are inextricably linked to the status and fortunes of African Americans as a whole, has long been used to explain African Americans’ distinct political unity and policy views. Yet, despite its wide usage, linked fate is weakly associated with Black political behavior. Building on previous research on the limitations of linked fate (Gay et al 2016; McClain et al. 2009) we argue that linked fate does not predict African Americans’ political views reliably because the measure is apolitical and more appropriate for measuring social connectedness. In this paper, we rely on ANES data (2004 -2020) from ~ 2,800 Black respondents to create a multi-dimensional measure of a politicized racial identity (PRI). Our measure combines the linked fate survey item with the Black Americans feeling thermometer and two items from the racial resentment scale. We demonstrate that our PRI measure more reliably and powerfully explains a wide range of Black political views compared to linked fate. Our results indicate that PRI has strong explanatory power for explicitly racial policies (e.g., affirmative action), moderate explanatory power for implicitly racial policies (e.g., welfare), and weak explanatory power for nonracial policies (foreign policy). PRI also helps us to better understand variation in Black political views. These findings provide strong evidence that linked fate has limited explanatory scope.
Header: © Jana Curcio, Skin Tones Series, 2019.