| Abstract
| - When white Americans think about welfare, they are likely to think about black Americans. The most prominent explanation for this phenomenon offered has been media coverage—newsmakers have presented welfare as an overwhelmingly black and overwhelmingly bad social program. Most of the data used in studies that reach these conclusions, however, predate welfare reform. Since passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), welfare has lost its place among America's most controversial issues. While there are many critics of the reform, many more declare it a success, and these elites are both Republican and Democrat. Opinion polls indicate that a majority of the public is favorably inclined toward the passed reforms. In this paper, we provide systematic evidence that the information environment surrounding welfare policy has changed. Given this, we pose the following research question: do negative attitudes about blacks continue to color people's willingness to spend money on welfare programs? We address this question by examining the predictors of opposition to welfare spending in the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 American National Election Studies. The evidence suggests that despite the changing information environment, welfare attitudes are as strongly racialized in 2004, as they were a decade earlier.
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