Intuitively, the BE doesn't make sense to me. Sure, people will lie in public. But wouldn't it be much more likely for a person who has racist beliefs about a candidate to make up some other reason why he/she wasn't going to vote for the person rather than say that he/she was?
[WS:] I agree. People who hold racist views usually have no problems expressing them in public, at least based on my experience. So I see no reason why they should feel an urge to hide them from pollsters.
However, it is well known that social desirability skew poll results. It has been documented that people tend to overreport things that they view as socially desirable and underreport things that socially undesirable. The problem with the alleged Bradley effect is that it rests on the assumption that may or may not hold for particular respondents, namely that negative views of Blacks are socially undersirable. Without that assumption, the alleged Bradley effect makes no sense whatsoever.
In reality, however, people who hold such views do not see them as socially undesirable but as something either justified by some sort of rationalization, or even a socially desirable form of independent judgment and not succumbing to "political correctness." The only people who consider negative views of Blacks socially undesirable are liberals. So to prove Bradley effect, one would need to show liberals voting for a more conservative white candidate rather than a more liberal black one. Wojtek
--------------------------------------------------------------- "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken ----------------------------------------------------------------