Affirmative action isn’t just for college admissions, and outside of college admissions, affirmative action programs generally do not involve decision preferences, but are limited largely to training programs, outreach efforts, and other funnel-shaping efforts.
So, the poll results are perfectly consistent with people understanding the question and either supporting AAP in general but not in college admissioms, or supporting it in general but not when it goes beyond funnel-shaping to include decision preferences. They are also consistent with them supporting it in college, and involving decision preferences, but only on ethnicity, gender, and other non-race factors, though that seems less likely.
A conclusion based on those polls for affirmative action in college is that people support the general principle of getting more minorities into college, but do not support the current methods applied under affirmative action. When specifics are outlined for respondents the support drops.
This has less to do with the style of shaping the response by what kind of questions are made, and more to do with what the question is. Support for a concept is not the same as support for a specific action. If you ask people to choose between multiple of bad choices in order to achieve a common good then the goal is likely to have a significant higher support than any of the bad choices.
Americans do more or less support affirmative action programs, but the details matter:
> "Poll results vary widely, for example, according to specific question wordings. In general, historical polling data show that Americans have an overall positive view toward "affirmative action" and programs that increase opportunities for minorities, so long as these do not confer an unfair advantage for minorities in the form of "preferential treatment" or "lower standards."
More concretely, compare the following proposition:
> "Setting quotas for the number of racial minorities hired or accepted, but requiring them to meet the same standards as others (66% favor, 32% oppose)"
To this one:
> "Setting quotas for the number of racial minorities hired or accepted even if it means lowering the standards in order to make up for past discrimination (18% favor, 79% oppose)"
The survey specifically asks about racial discrimination. There is indeed more widespread support for "affirmative action", but not race-based affirmative action. I don't think the supreme court is going to strike down policies favoring first generation college students or low income students, only those focused on race.
The four different polls we found in that thread found that, in the US, 24%, 27%, 45%, or 62% supports affirmative action. None of these is "a small minority", though some do fall short of being "broad popular support".
Unfortunately the framing matters a lot, and people are not logically consistent in their preferences. The only way to know if people support affirmative action is to ask them "do you support affirmative action?"
This reminds me of when Andrew Yang's campaign found that Americans are much more supportive of universal basic income proposals if you call it a "Freedom Dividend" instead of UBI. I imagine whether the proposal comes from a Republican or a Democrat also would have a big impact.
What you can't do is try to determine if someone supports a policy in the abstract and then assume that they must have the same attitude towards a real implementation of that policy.
A majority of every minority group opposes expressly considering race in hiring and education. The prevalence of these policies is the result of its popularity among the white social liberals who increasingly run the country’s businesses and institutions.
In addition to people in favor of affirmative action and people opposed to affirmative action, there's the large class of people who are in favor of affirmative action, but against the political correctness pressure of having to act like they believe this in for the benefit of all instead of the explicit benefit of the affected minority.
In other words, not using racial preferences in admissions decisions lets the black college enrollment trends continue; though, as the article doesn't point out, 'not using mandated racial preferences (banning aff. action)' is not the cause of disproportionate representation.
I think the argument against affirmative action is more, morally speaking, addressing the question, "should we use racial preference to fight racial preference?".
I'm not sure what other meaning of "affirmative action" there is.
Those studies claim that 27% and 24% of the surveyed population, respectively, favors affirmative action. I guess that falls short of "broad popular support" as I was saying, but it it's also far from what I think of as "far left", both because if the correlation with leftism were perfect, that's still the top quartile of the population, and because there's more to leftism than affirmative action, so the correlation isn't perfect. Other polls come up with numbers like 62% https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/565628-62-... and 45% (8 years ago) https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/poll_public_support_for_af....
I think a big part of what's going on here is that people don't think deeply so they can be easily influenced by how questions are phrased.
I agree that minority groups aren't the ones promoting affirmative action, but rather US elites, who are overwhelmingly white. I don't think it's a particularly liberal policy, though it's not something liberalism has defined itself by opposition to, and Millian consequentialist liberalism is a common framework for justifying it; but a lot of the constituency for affirmative action is illiberal "progressives".
Not commenting on that post because I didn’t see it but just noting. Some people support affirmative action. There are arguments that can be used that are somewhat convincing. Correcting generational feedback loops is hard and may require more than just blind indifference. Personally I think affirmative action can go too far, but it is very much a live issue in politics for good reason. Meanwhile there aren’t many who would say discrimination against people from the Middle East is good
Glad you thought it was interesting, that makes me really happy to hear. Re. "not really affirmative action", I'm not like an AA expert, but my university went all the way to the Supreme Court to defend that very admission policy, in a lawsuit that attempted to repeal affirmative action.
I think in general the population is mostly against affirmative action because it seems racist, and they just substitute their own ideas of how those policies are implemented. It's the same thing where if you asked people if murderers should be let go over some kind of procedural technicality, then they'd probably say no because murder is bad. However, in practice those technicalities are stuff like how evidence is collected, which can lead to potentially innocent people being convicted, etc...
It gets support because it gets votes. If Democratic voters weren’t asking for affirmative action, the Democratic Party would not pursue it, regardless if it’s bad policy or not, it’s pandering to the base.
Affirmative Action is systemic racial discrimination (by definition) and you think that has widespread support? Maybe in "progressive" circles, but I think most people see it for what it is.
I think most people rather support the idea of a needs based system, not one that requires a color chart to determine who gets what.
Ok, yeah. But as a barometer of attitude, that's a lot of people who agree that affirmative action is a bad idea. It's not an unassailable tenet of American politics.
I don't see the problem with this kind of affirmative action, but reasonable people could vote out the US administration that supports this if it's important to them.
No, it's a lot of people that agree that explicit racial preferences are a bad idea; but then, in most contexts (e.g., hiring) those have been banned federally even where Affirmative Action is mandatory (e.g., federal contracting covered by the EOs requiring affirmative action.)
I decided to look up proposition 209 exit polls [1]. (Proposition 209 ended affirmative action in California university admissions.)
Support for Prop. 209 was: white 63%, black 26%, latino 24%, asian 39%.
Another article [2] says that exit polling showed 27% of people that voted for 209 "also voiced support for 'affirmative-action programs designed to help women and minorities.'" (The question was in fact, "Are you in favor of both private and public affirmative action programs designed to help women and minorities get better jobs and education, or are you opposed to them?" It's from the L.A. Times exit poll [1])
Note that the overall proportion on that question was 54% in favor, 46% opposed.
I now invite you to divine what proportion of each minority group was in fact confused voters.
Now, this is affirmative action, not the definition of racism, personally I'd expect exit polls asking "Is it racist for a black store owner to ban whites from his store?" to get "Yes" with quite a higher proportion across all the population than what you see here. (And "Is it racist for a white store owner to ban whites from his store?" would get a ton of yesses too.)
So, the poll results are perfectly consistent with people understanding the question and either supporting AAP in general but not in college admissioms, or supporting it in general but not when it goes beyond funnel-shaping to include decision preferences. They are also consistent with them supporting it in college, and involving decision preferences, but only on ethnicity, gender, and other non-race factors, though that seems less likely.
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