A right and a privilege? Examining White americans' construal of voting as a privilege, anti-Black attitudes, and voter suppression support.

Although Americans express commitment to democratic norms, nearly half of White Americans prefer to define voting as a privilege that can be limited among U.S. citizens. Across four studies (total N = 10,016), we examine how White Americans construe the concept of voting as an exclusionary privilege to illuminate when White Americans are likely to support restricting voter access. In Study 1, we find that White Americans' perception of voting as a privilege is tied to seeing racism as less of an important social issue today and a greater focus on restricting voting, a pattern not observed among Black Americans. Study 2 shows that White Americans can construe voting as both a privilege and a right. Yet, only the perception of voting as a privilege (but not as a right) mediates the direct effect of anti-Black attitudes on support for policies that suppress voting legally (e.g., voter ID laws) and illegally (e.g., literacy tests). In Studies 3 and 4, we experimentally manipulate White Americans' prescriptive beliefs about voting and find that shifting beliefs about whether voting should be a privilege or a right can, in turn, shift support for voter access policies. Taken together, White Americans' construal of voting as a privilege is uniquely and consequentially tied to negative racial attitudes and support for policies that disproportionately suppress voting among marginalized racial outgroups. Implications for how construing core civic processes as a privilege may operate as a race-neutral cover for dominant groups to maintain group power are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).