The Boats and the Structure of Australian Racial Attitudes: It's not just your grandfather's racism

Asylum seeker politics has dominated Australian politics since the mid-1990s making political discourse more extreme with consequences for how Australians vote. The issue fits into a broad race-related factor of Australian political ideology. Unlike European centre-right parties their Australian equivalents have benefited from these politics and the underlying political psychology that forms these policy preferences. I employ a structural equation model on the 2019 Australian Cooperative Election Survey data to recover structure of the racial attitudes based on three racial belief components: overt racism, deficient character racism, and racial discrimination denialism. These are respectively unambiguous, clear, and uncertain measures of prejudice. Again, these are respectively based on biological inferiority, internal attribution, and external attribution of success. I then link these beliefs with authoritarian personality to predict attitudes towards asylum policy. Deficit character racism and radical discrimination denialism are highly interrelated, and both strongly predict policy preferences. Overt racism has little explanatory power. Explanations for these beliefs do not need to rely on new racism measures (Kinder & Sanders 1996) but can be explained through just world theory as Wilson & Davis (2022) reconceptualised racial resentment. By following Huddy & Feldman (2009) more directly measuring racial attitudes the source of these extremist politics can be better identified with clear lessons for European political science methodological practice.