Goals of this exercise

• Consider the goals and instrumental reasoning used by white and black citizens on matters related to affirmative action.
• Provide survey data of white and black respondents’ views of affirmative action in hiring and promotion practices.
• Examine how various affirmative action programs including incentive programs and quotas can be considered as “rules” and “procedures” that influence the outcomes of political and economic struggles.

The Three-Fifths Compromise

• What was it? The Three-Fifths Compromise held that three of every five slaves would count as “population” for the purposes of apportioning seats in the House of Representatives.
• Who advocated it? Southern states – where over 90 percent of slaves in America lived and “constituted about 30 percent of the population of the region."
• Who opposed it? Northern states – where very few slaves resided in America.

Attitudes Toward Affirmative Action: Goals and Purposes

Principle #1. All political behavior is purposive.

Presumably, the acts of hiring, education admissions, and the awarding of government contracts reflect the goals of getting the best person, admitting the best student body, and contracting out government services to the best public sector actors.

Still, some opponents of affirmative action believe that it represents a “reverse discrimination” that violates the societal goal of having decisions made based on merit and “color blindness.”

Attitudes Toward Affirmative Action: Goals and Purposes

Question 1: How do white respondents and African American respondents differ on Affirmative Action as it relates to hiring and promotion?

Question 2: How does this data support and/or disconfirm our expectations of the goal-orientation of white and African Americans on the question of affirmative action?

Question 3: Despite the fact that African Americans support affirmative action more than white respondents, still a relatively large percentage of African Americans oppose affirmative action in hiring and promotion. What factors might explain this?

Principle #3: Rules and Procedures Matter.

In some ways, we can consider affirmative action programs as rules designed to discourage racism in hiring and to encourage the active consideration of African American applicants for hiring, education admissions, government contracts, etc.

Indeed, what is society to do with the goals of political actors (those who hire, admissions officers, and those who award government contracts) that represent lingering racial prejudice?

One way to overcome negative “goals” such as racial prejudice is to impose rules that disincentivize the implementation of racism in hiring, educational admissions, and government contracts.

Question 4: How might affirmative action be considered a “rule” that helps to shape individual actors’ goals to help overcome racism?

Question 5: Is there a difference between quotas which require employers and admissions officers to hire or admit a certain number of any racial or ethnic group and affirmative action systems (like the University of Michigan’s admissions program’s “points” system) that treat race not as the sole factor but instead as one of among a number of factors that influence the admissions or hiring decision?

Citations

• General Social Survey, Cumulative Datafile, 1972-2004, http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda3. (Accessed 5/18/06).