Race and redistribution in the United States: An experimental analysis

Abstract

Scholars have suggested that White American support for welfare is influenced by their beliefs about the racial composition of welfare recipients. In this paper, we test this hypothesis using two experiments ($n=9,775$) that induce random variation in participants’ beliefs about the racial distribution of welfare recipients. In both experiments, we obtain evidence that exogenously increasing beliefs about the share of welfare recipients who are Black reduces support for welfare. We also use our experiments to study the effect of ‘priming’ participants to think about race, the accuracy of beliefs about the racial distribution of welfare recipients, and the mechanisms that underpin our results.