Who Protests: Self-Interest and White Opposition to Busing

Abstract

The most firmly entrenched example of the empirical disjuncture between self-interest and political attitudes concerns busing as a means of integrating schools. National and local survey data demonstrate that whites who are directly affected by busing are no more likely than other whites to oppose it. In this paper, we investigate the behavioral dimension of white opposition to busing--a dimension that previous scholars have ignored. We find that, while personal concerns may not influence what whites think, they do determine whether whites act. Our results underscore the distinction between the behavioral and the attitudinal dimensions of mass politics.

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