Fig 1.
The racial divide over dogs and pit bulls.
Sources: 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey; Pew Social Trends Poll, Oct-Nov 2005; Pooled Lucid Surveys, 2018–2021.
Table 1.
(OLS) predictors of white Americans opinions of pit bulls and other dog breeds.
Fig 2.
Perceptions of whether black or white people are more likely to own certain dog breeds.
Note: Question asked respondents: “If you had to guess, do you think Black people or white people are more likely to own the following dogs?” Source: Pooled Lucid Surveys, June-July 2020, August 2021.
Fig 3.
Favorability ratings of African Americans predict white Americans’ support for pit bulls.
Note: Predicted probabilities are based on the logistic regression coefficients in Table A2 in S1 Appendix. Predicted probabilities were calculated by setting favorability rating of whites, partisanship, age, education level and gender to the mean white respondent. Sources: 2018 CCES Team Module; 2018–2021 Pooled Lucid Surveys; white respondents only.
Fig 4.
Opinions of pit bull legalization by race and experimental condition.
The baseline condition asked, “Do you think that it should be legal or illegal to own a pit bull?” The inner-city condition asked, “Do you think that it should be legal or illegal to own a pit bull in inner-city neighborhoods?” Source: Pooled Lucid Surveys, June 2020, July 2020, August 2021.
Fig 5.
State-level racial prejudice negatively predicts which states have passed laws preempting breed-specific legislation.
Note: Analysis limited to continental United States. Lines are smoothed averages (bandwidth = .80) Source: Data on state laws from Fix and Mitchell; state-level white opposition to interracial dating from the 1987–2012 Pew Values Survey Merged File; data on racist searches are from Google Trends, 2004–2019.