The study, led by psychologists at the University of Washington, shows that between January and April 2012 eligible voters who favored whites over blacks – either consciously or unconsciously – also favored Republican candidates relative to Barack Obama.

"People were saying that with Obama's election race became a dead issue, but that's not at all the case," said lead investigator Anthony Greenwald, a UW psychology professor.

The study's findings mean that many white and non-white voters, even those who don't believe they tend to favor whites over blacks, might vote against Obama because of his race. These voters could cite the economy or other reasons, but a contributing cause could nevertheless be their conscious or unconscious racial attitudes.

"Our findings may indicate that many of those who expressed egalitarian attitudes by voting for Obama in 2008 and credited themselves with having 'done the right thing' then are now letting other considerations prevail," said collaborator Mahzarin Banaji, a psychology professor at Harvard University.

In the study, a majority of white eligible voters showed a pattern labeled "automatic white preference" on a widely used measure of unconscious race bias. Previous studies indicate that close to 75 percent of white Americans show this implicit bias.

In a study done just prior to the 2008 presidential election, Greenwald and colleagues found that race attitudes played a role in predicting votes for the Republican candidate John McCain.

The 2012 data, collected from nearly 15,000 voters, show that race was again a significant factor in candidate preferences.

In an online survey, Greenwald asked survey-takers about their political beliefs, how "warmly" they felt toward black and white people, and which presidential contender they preferred. Because the survey was conducted in the first four months of 2012, it included the five main Republican hopefuls – Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum – as well as Obama.

Greenwald also measured unconscious race attitude using the Implicit Association Test, a tool he developed more than a decade ago to gauge thoughts that people don't realize they have. Different variations of the test measure implicit attitudes about race, gender, sexuality, ethnicities and other topics.

Greenwald found that favoritism for Republican candidates was predicted by respondents' racial attitudes, both their self-reported views and their implicit biases measured by the IAT. Greenwald emphasized that the study's finding that some candidates are more attractive to voters with pro-white racial attitudes does not mean that those candidates are racist.

"The study's findings raise an interesting question: After nearly four years of having an African-American president in the White House, why do race attitudes continue to have a role in electoral politics?" Greenwald said.

He suspects that Obama's power as president in 2012, compared with his lesser status as candidate in 2008, may have "brought out race-based antagonism that had less reason to be activated in 2008."

Another possibility is that Republican candidates' assertions that their most important goal is to remove Obama from the presidency "may have strong appeal to those who have latent racial motivation," Greenwald said.

Greenwald and his research team will continue to collect people's attitudes about the 2012 presidential candidates as part of their Decision 2012 IAT study. Now that Mitt Romney has emerged as the presumptive Republican nominee, the researchers are modifying their survey to focus on voters' comparisons of Romney with Obama.

They plan to post summaries of the data each month until the November election. Anyone can take the test online: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/featuredtask.html

Other collaborators on the Decision 2012 IAT project are Teri Kirby and Kaiyuan Xu, both at UW, and Brian Nosek and Sriram Natarajan, at the University of Virginia. Nosek and Banaji have collaborated with Greenwald in developing uses of the Implicit Association Test since the test's creation in the 1990s.

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For more information, contact Greenwald at 206-543-7227 or agg@uw.edu, Banaji at 617-384-9203 or mahzarin_banaji@harvard.edu, or Nosek at nosek@virginia.edu.

Rehabilitating juvenile offenders and reintegrating them into society is the goal of the juvenile justice system, but widespread distribution of records prevents thousands of Washington teens from participating without being haunted by the mistakes of their past.

On Thursday, May 12, Governor Chris Gregoire will sign a bill that will change all that, thanks to students at the Child and Youth Legislative Advocacy Clinic at the University of Washington

The bill bans private credit reporting agencies from selling a youth’s criminal records after he or she turns 21. The measure will also allow a youth who has received a pardon the chance to start over with a clean record. In addition, the bill will create a legislative task force to determine cost-effective ways to further protect juvenile record information.

“Kids’ lives were being ruined by their records,” explained clinic member Mike Felton. “The rehabilitative purpose of the juvenile system is contradicted when private companies sell kids’ records for a profit.  It makes it harder for young people to start over with a new job and a place to live.”

The law school students worked with Rep. Jeannie Darneille (D-27, Tacoma) to secure passage of the bill. Other support came from Rep. Ruth Kagi (D-32, Lake Forest Park), Rep. Mary Helen Roberts (D-21, Edmonds), Sen. Nick Harper (D-38, Everett), Sen. Jim Hargrove (D-24, Hoquiam) and Sen. Debbie Regala (D-27, Tacoma).

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For more information on Substitute House Bill 1793 or the Child and Youth Legislative Advocacy Clinic, contact Emily Brice at uwlegislativeclinic@gmail.com or 773-870-2755.

The Alaskan Way Viaduct now carries traffic along Seattle's waterfront. It is slated for demolition.

Washington State Department of Transportation

Debate about how to replace Seattle’s deteriorating waterfront highway has centered on uncertainties in the project’s price tag. Drilling a deep-bore tunnel and building an underground highway is estimated to cost around $4 billion, but some worry the final price could be higher, as it was for Boston’s infamous Big Dig.

University of Washington statisticians have, for the first time, explored a different subject of uncertainty, namely surrounding how much commuters might benefit from the project. They found that relying on surface streets would likely have less impact on travel times than previously reported, and that different options’ effects on commute times are not well known.

The research, conducted in 2009, was originally intended as an academic exercise looking at how to assess uncertainties in travel-time projections from urban transportation and land-use models. But the paper is being published amid renewed debate about the future of Seattle’s waterfront thoroughfare.

“In early 2009 it was decided there would be a tunnel, and we said, ‘Well, the issue is settled but it’s still of academic interest,’” said co-author Adrian Raftery, a UW statistics professor. “Now it has all bubbled up again.”

The study was cited last month in a report by the Seattle Department of Transportation reviewing the tunnel’s impact. It is now available online, and will be published in the July issue of the journal Transportation Research: Part A.

Researchers looked at eight routes that currently include the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

University of Washington

The study found that simply erasing the structure in 2010 would increase travel times a decade later for the eight routes that currently include the viaduct by 1.5 minutes to 9.2 minutes, with an average increase of 6 minutes. The uncertainty was fairly large, with zero change within the 95 percent confidence range for all the viaduct routes, and more than 20 minutes increase as a reasonable projection in a few cases. In the short term some routes along Interstate 5 were slightly slower, but by 2020 the travel times returned to today’s levels.

“This indicates that over time removing the structure would increase commute times for people who use the viaduct by about six minutes, although there’s quite a bit of uncertainty about exactly how much,” Raftery said. “In the rest of the region, on I-5, there’s no indication that it would increase commute times at all.”

The study also considered the effects on 14 routes, shown here, that do not include the viaduct.

University of Washington

The UW team in late 2009 ran the same travel model but added an urban land-use component that allows people and businesses to adapt over time – for instance by moving, switching jobs or relocating businesses.

It also included a statistical method that puts error bars around the travel-time projections.

“There is a big interest among transportation planners in putting an uncertainty range around modeling results,” said co-author Hana Ševčíková, a UW research scientist who ran the model.

“Often in policy discussions there’s interest in either one end or the other of an interval: How bad could things be if we don’t make an investment, or if we do make an investment, are we sure that it’s necessary?” Raftery said. “The ends of the interval can give you a sense of that.”

The UW study used a method called Bayesian statistics to combine computer models with actual data. Researchers used 2000 and 2005 land-use data and 2005 commute travel times to fine-tune the model. Bayesian statistics improves the model’s accuracy and provides an uncertainty range around the model’s projections.

The study used UrbanSim, an urban simulation model developed by co-author and former UW faculty member Paul Waddell, now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The model starts running in the year 2000, the viaduct is taken down in 2010 and the study focuses on peak morning commutes in the year 2020.

Despite renewed discussion, the authors are not taking a position on the debate.

“This is a scientific assessment. People could well say that six minutes is a lot, and it’s worth whatever it takes [to avoid it],” Raftery said. “To some extent it comes down to a value judgment, factoring in the economic and environmental impacts.”

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For more information, contact Raftery at 206-543-4505 or raftery@stat.washington.edu.

In other words, tea party conservatives differ from other conservatives. A lot.

Findings from the Multi-state Survey on Race and Politics at the UW amplify observations, voiced recently by mainstream conservative columnists such as Michael Medved and George Will, suggesting that the tea party is taking its philosophy in directions far more extreme than those of average conservatives.

“Our data suggests the concerns of George Will and other conservatives are well founded. [Former House Speaker Newt] Gingrich and [former Arkansas Gov. Mike] Huckabee’s attacks on the president, apparently designed to appeal to tea party supporters, are far removed from the conservative mainstream,” said Christopher Parker, a UW associate professor of political science, who led the survey.

Survey respondents identified themselves as liberal, conservative or moderate. To examine the suggestion that tea party conservatives differ from more mainstream ones, Parker partitioned self-identified conservatives into two categories: those who strongly support the tea party and those who don’t. For analysis, Parker identified as mainstream those conservatives who do not strongly support the tea party. He then examined their responses to questions about President Barack Obama.

Among the results are:

• 6 percent of mainstream conservatives believe Obama is destroying the country; 71 percent of tea party conservatives believe this to be true.
• 16 percent of mainstream conservatives believe Obama is a practicing Muslim; 27 percent of tea party conservatives believe that.
• 46 percent of mainstream conservatives believe Obama is a practicing Christian; 27 percent of tea party conservatives believe that.
• 55 percent of mainstream conservatives believe Obama was born in the United States; 40 percent of tea party conservatives believe that.
• 17 percent of mainstream conservatives believe Obama doesn't have a valid birth certificate; 26 percent of tea party conservatives don't believe he has one.
• 40 percent of mainstream conservatives believe Obama's policies are pushing the country toward socialism; 75 percent of tea party conservatives believe that.
• 32 percent of mainstream conservatives want Obama's policies to fail; 76 percent of tea party conservatives want this to happen.

The survey was conducted from Jan. 24 through March 12. Callers used both land and cell telephone numbers to reach 1,504 adults in 13 states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Wisconsin. The survey’s margin of error is plus or minus 2.5 percent. Funding came from the Royalty Research Fund at the UW.

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For additional information, contact Parker at 206-543-2947 or csparker@uw.edu.

A six-member panel moderated by Mary D. Fan, UW assistant professor of law, will explore these issues and related ones from 3:30 to 5 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 24, in 119 William H. Gates Hall.

“Racial Disparity and the Criminal Justice System” will be presented by the UW Minority Law Students Association. Members of the panel will be:

• Veronica Alicea-Galvan, judge of the Des Moines, Wash. Municipal Court.

• Katherine Beckett, UW sociology professor with a joint appointment in the Law, Societies and Justice Program.

• Jeff Geoghagan, an officer on the Seattle Police Department SWAT team.

• Alexes Harris, UW assistant professor of sociology.

• Anita Khandelwal, a staff attorney at The Defender Association in Seattle.

• Mark Larson, chief criminal deputy, King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.

For more information, contact Michael Kim, president of the Minority Law Students Association, at mdkim85@uw.edu or 818-219-6850.

Four UW experts, including two in Cairo, will address the question in a panel discussion at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 17, in 210 Kane.

The discussion is titled Egypt: The Revolution and the Future. Participating will be:

• Hind Ahmed, a doctoral student in political science and an activist in Tahrir Square, speaking live from Cairo.
• Ellis Goldberg, a professor of political science and a Carnegie Fellow, speaking live from Cairo.
• Joel S. Migdal, the Robert F. Philip Professor of International Studies.
• Reşat Kasaba, director of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies.

For more information visit the Middle East Center’s events page online or contact Felicia Hecker, associate director of the Middle East Center, at fhecker@uw.edu or 206-543-4227.

A new book, "Jobs That Matter: Find a Stable, Fulfilling Career in Public Service," (JIST Publishing, $14.95) shows how to launch a career that not only changes the world but provides steady paychecks.

The author, Heather Krasna, 37, has been a career counselor for 12 years. She's now director of career services at the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington.

The book appears at a time when millions of Americans are looking for public service jobs fresh out of school, seeking new careers in public service because of layoffs or changing careers to follow their dreams. The book also appears as some 270,000 baby boomers, some of whom were inspired by President John F. Kennedy, are nearing retirement from federal jobs, and as the Obama administration encourages young people to consider careers in public service. To encourage young people to consider public service, the federal Office of Personnel management has created a "coolness" task force.

Noting the need for a how-to on public service careers, Krasna wrote "Jobs that Matter" in only four months.

JIST Publishing

"I wrote at night, on the bus, on the weekends," she said. "I was surprised I was able to pull off the writing in a short period of time."

The book came together quickly, she said, because much information was already in her head, the result of years as a career adviser and employer relations specialist plus experience in an array of internships and volunteer jobs in public service.

Daughter of a political science professor and an English professor in Michigan, Krasna received a master's degree in nonprofit management from Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy in New York City. She specializes in distilling information and making human connections -- what it takes, Krasna said, to land a job in public service.

The initial chapter of "Jobs that Matter" takes readers through a series of exercises: defining career dreams, choosing career missions such as children's issues or civil rights, targeting job functions such as urban planning, and deciding work values such as prestige, level of responsibility and tolerance of stress.

The subsequent eight chapters resulted from extensive research. Krasna studied hundreds of jobs listed in the Occupational Outlook Handbook compiled by the U.S. Department of Labor. She studied scores of organizations that hire public service professionals. She used LinkedIn, GovLoop, Twitter, Facebook and referrals from colleagues and friends to find and interview dozens of people in public service jobs.

Heather Krasna -- UW Photo

Thematically organized around job types, the chapters range from human services and health to protecting the environment and managing financial resources. They also include 26 profiles of public service professionals. In "Keeping People Safe," for example, Krasna profiles Ronald S. Neubauer, executive director of the Eastern Missouri Law Enforcement Training Center, who began his career with a military police unit in Vietnam.

Krasna also offers tips for landing jobs at specific places, such as the United Nations. (The U.N. is really tough: "Because of its relatively high pay and excellent benefits," Krasna writes, "the United Nations is extremely competitive, and hiring can sometimes be limited for U.S. citizens.")

The last three chapters of "Jobs That Matter" focus on the job search itself: developing a resume, networking, navigating the application process, interviewing, negotiating offers and getting promoted.

Krasna takes pains with details. For bullet points of a resume, she urges job seekers to quantify their experience in a certain formula. It results in such lines as, "Effectively tutored up to 20 students per month, greatly improving their test scores." Krasna also offers guidance about essays necessary for some federal work and tips about negotiating salaries for public service jobs.