Is it Just Us or the System? Relationships between political ideologies and attributions for racial disparities

While the problem of racism and racial disparities is a complicated, multi-faceted issue, one area we can focus on is framing. Framing is defined by how someone attributes responsibility for social problems, which functions to shape the way one thinks about a problem by suggesting what the problem is about, what the cause is, and what should be done about the problem (Kim, 2015). Preferred types of framing may vary by political ideology, since conservatives and liberals seem to hold distinct and conflicting attitudes about racial disparities. These attributional frames are partly informed by the media, which can shape public opinion. The purpose of this study is to observe the relationship between political ideology and preferences in types of disparity framings (individual, structural, and systemic). We aim to answer two questions: 1.) Do liberals generally emphasize discourse on racial disparities more than conservatives? and 2.) Do conservatives and liberals prefer to use a particular type of framing over another as a point of reference for understanding the causes of racial disparities? We do this by analyzing print articles from various think tanks based in the United States across the political spectrum, using think tanks as a reference to capture these ideological trends.