What the Demolition of Public Housing Teaches Us about the Impact of Racial Threat on Political

Behaviour

Ryan D. Enos

Problem: The study of individual behaviour and geographic context is difficult for many reasons:
inference can be dependent on the choice of unit of measurement, self-selection makes it difficult to
identify a causal effect of context on behavior, and, even if a causal connection can be established,
there is little agreement about the mechanism underlying this effect. Furthermore, long-standing
research on racial politics argues that racial attitudes are highly stable and formed by early-life
socialization, making it unlikely that behaviour should be a direct function of racial context.

Goal of the article: I exploit an event in which demographic context was exogenously changed,
leading to a significant change in voters’ behaviour and demonstrating that voters react strongly to
changes in an outgroup population.

Conclusion: Racial threat occurs because of attitude change rather than selection.

I argue that these results demonstrate that racialized political behaviours are highly context
dependent and that white voters respond significantly to changes in the African American population
over a period of just 4 years, suggesting that racial threat findings are not driven by the selection of
individuals into contexts. Furthermore, I argue that I isolate an effect of racial threat that is causally
identified and is not subject to the usual risks to inference associated with the limited data used to
study the effects of context.

My findings suggest that proximity is often not a valid measure of social interaction and that, in
segregated contexts, proximity may increase conflict.

It seems that the ideal conditions for racial and other group-based threat may be when groups are
separated but closely proximate.