Audit experiments & bias detection

TITLE: The Intersection of Racial and Partisan Discrimination: Evidence from a Correspondence Study of Four-Year Colleges

ABSTRACT: Social decisions are often imbued with biases that can lead to discrimination against certain groups of people. Racial minorities frequently find themselves on the receiving end of such discrimination. Recent work also reveals partisan bias such that members of one political party unfairly favor their copartisans or discriminate against members of the other party. In this article, we use an e-mail correspondence study to explore the impact of racial and partisan discrimination in higher education.We find no direct evidence of a racial or political bias; however, we do find that African Americans who reference politics in any way receive substantially fewer responses. This coheres with the theory of racial threat: members of a majority group are averse to minorities who might threaten their political, economic, or social status.