The importance of local racial demographic changes in democratic erosion in the mass American public

Abstract

Violent sentiment is deeply tied to racial threat from the changing racial demography of the United States. Extending the historical idea of White flight, we find shifting local racial demographic conditions in tandem with a simple prime of national conditions causally drive more violent, antidemocratic attitudes across White Americans. We term this as “White fight sentiment.” Across four experiments conducted over the span of 3 y, using probability, state targeted, and convenience samples, we find that when we randomly prime national diversification among White Americans in locations that experienced local Black population increase or White decline, they become expressively, consistently more extreme when primed. Surprisingly, we consistently find null effects in communities that recently experienced Hispanic and Asian population change, short of one case across our four studies. Through a series of robustness checks we confirm national considerations specifically activate White fight.