Guilt by Association: White Collective Guilt in American Politics

Decades of research have illuminated the pernicious effects of white racial prejudice on American politics. However, by focusing on prejudice, scholars have neglected other racial attitudes that might be relevant to whites’ political preferences. Our project addresses this omission by exploring how American politics is affected by white collective guilt—defined as remorse that a white person experiences due to her group’s actions toward black people. We expect collective guilt to motivate white support for both policies perceived to benefit African Americans and black politicians; we also theorize conditions under which collective guilt is uniquely activated. We examine these expectations using original data from five national surveys, including two embedded experiments. The results reveal that collective guilt has considerable explanatory power, even after taking standard measures of racial attitudes into account. We conclude that collective guilt is an independent racial attitude with significant consequences for white opinion.