Racial populism, partisan spillover, and Americans’ quest for citizen education policy control: implications for European democracies

Ethnoracial populism and partisan polarisation have become key factors in education politics, intensifying the crisis in education policymaking across the West. Rightwing elites promote exclusionary education policies, dubbed ‘anti-woke,’ that threaten minority and immigrant integration, upending progressive gains. In the US, populism is reflected in many Whites’ support for citizen over expert control of education policymaking, including monitoring teacher behaviour through tiplines and penalties, policies that harm morale and perpetuate conflict. Here, we ask whether Whites’ support for citizen control in education results from partisan spillover or policy racialisation processes. Two survey experiments show that White Americans are more supportive of citizen control in education when compared with policing. Within education, we find a preference for citizen control over history and international studies curricula, a finding we do not observe with math and physics. Furthermore, support for citizen control is stronger among those who score highly on racial resentment, providing strong evidence of the racialisation of education policy at the local level. By contrast, partisanship is not a consistent predictor of preferences.