Who Is in Favor of Affirmative Action? Representative Evidence from an Experiment and a Survey

Sabrina Herzog, Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch (), Chi Trieu () and Jana Willrodt ()
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Sabrina Herzog: Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch: Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods
Chi Trieu: Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE)
Jana Willrodt: Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE)

No 16640, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Although affirmative action remains controversial, little is known about who supports or opposes it and why. This paper investigates preferences for affirmative action by combining causal evidence from an experiment on the role of self-serving motives and in-group favoritism with survey data on three different affirmative action policies. Our results rely on a population-representative sample from the US. We find that support for affirmative action is based both on self-serving motives and principled grounds (e.g., related to an individual's altruism, fairness perceptions, concerns for efficiency, and political views). By contrast, in-group favoritism and socio-demographic characteristics play a much smaller role.

Keywords: support for affirmative action; self-serving motives; in-group favoritism; altruism; efficiency; fairness; discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C99 D01 D63 J78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65 pages
Date: 2023-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-lma
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