1) Beyond essays and speculative punditry, there's little existing research on the phenomenon of political correctness. My own research finds 'white guilt' to be one of its strongest correlates (r=0.517). In analyzing data from the ANES 2016 pilot, several trends emerge.
2) First, the degree of white guilt appears to be partly a function of a generational effect. 
3) Educational attainment is also relevant, the effects of which are most pronounced among Millenials (r=0.229; n=169).
4) And, incidentally, support for PC jumps among White Millenials as well
5) By generation + education
6) Finally, and as mentioned at the outset, support for PC is fairly strongly related to white guilt.
7) So what explains this pattern? Is it merely a cohort effect--the product of Millenials growing up in an era of increasing demographic diversity/ social media activism--or is our education system different (both in terms of curriculum and student bodies) than in years past?
8) I'll take the easy/cliched route and say it's likely a product of both. So what do you all think?
8) Another thing I'll add is that some attribute opposition to PC to 'symbolic racism'. However, following the results of Carney & Enos (2015)--which suggest that the symbolic racism scale is more a measure of 'liberal racial sympathy' than anti-black prejudice--I decided to...
9) ...reverse code the symbolic racism scale and regress it on white guilt and measures of prejudice (stereotypes, feeling thermometer scores) and the usual political/biographical controls. In the end, WG proved to be the strongest predictor (r=0.65; t=9.94).
10) If there's a silver lining here to be found here, it's that a slim majority (54%) of White Millenials oppose PC (though once we include minorities, opposition drops to approx. 48.5%).
11) Paper I'm working on now explores the effects of WG (r=0.387) on pro-immigration attitudes. Relationship is robust to a fully specified model.
12) In the graph below, for those that are interested, I've estimated a fully specified logistic regression model to illustrate the effects of WG on the probability of supporting PC (SPC).
12) Unsurprisingly, the 'White Privilege Awareness' instrument was also significantly predictive of PC attitudes (and significantly correlated with WG, r=0.55, p=0.00).
13) Also of note, Need for Cognition was a significantly negative predictor of support for PC--both in the specified model as well as bivariately (r= -0.085, p=0.003). I'm hesitant 2 read too much into it, but it could speak to PC's authoritarian dimension tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/75…
14) For those who don't know how to interpret the model below, the takeaway is that while controlling for the effects of prejudice and attitudes towards minorities, each level increase in WG still results in an estimated 6.4% increase in the odds of being pro-pc.
15) Moving from the bottom (13.5% prob.) to the top (74.6% prob) of the WG scale corresponds to an approx. 61% increase in the probability of supporting PC.
