Políticas de ação afirmativa e o experimento de listas: O caso das cotas raciais na universidade brasileira

Abstract

In this article, we adopt an indirect questioning methodology to measure attitudes toward the use of race as a criterion for admission in Brazilian higher education institutions. We hypothesize that attitudes toward such affirmative action policies cannot be measured by conventional survey questions because non-eligible students - mostly white students - may fear to appear prejudiced by showing opposition to them. This survey effect is known as the social desirability effect. Thus we adopt a list experiment to measure students' sincere attitudes toward the race-based quota admission system. We find that white students do not over-report their approval of racial quotas in university admissions. But, the results show that quota eligible students, Afro and indigenous Brazilians, tend to overwhelmingly under-report their approval of race quotas. Specifically, eligible students strongly approve of the racial quota system (68.3%) when provided privacy in their responses, but publicly voice only timid approval of it (29.0%). We label this effect as the inhibition effect. Moreover, we did not find a social desirability effect among white students, contrasting with some previous findings in the U.S.