Latinos and Political Emotions in the Age of Trump

• In Event: Group Conflict and Attitudes Toward Immigration

Abstract

It is uncontroversial to say that Donald Trump was able to activate emotional reactions from the American public during the 2016 Presidential Campaign. However, emotional reactions to Trump and his pronouncements might be particularly prominent among groups that are marginalized, targeted, or perceived as outgroups in America. Latinos, described as “unassimilable” by Huntington, represented one of such populations targeted by Donald Trump during his campaign. In addition to speaking about “Mexicans” in derogatory ways, Donald Trump used anti-immigrant rhetoric and proposals throughout his campaign. Both his ethnic and immigration-based messages are likely to have activated emotional and attitudinal reactions among Latinos. The extent to which these emotions were a reaction to Trump and impacted political attitudes and behavior is studied in this research project.
Our focus is on negative political emotions aimed at Trump and the Republican Party.

In addition to anxiety and anger, we include two important social emotions that have not yet been considered as central to political science: disgust and indignation. While disgust is more closely linked to foods and morality, it also can play a role in how people react to perceived group-based threats (Chapman et al. 2009). Indignation emerges as a reaction to a loss of dignity, to a threat to one’s public integrity. People who view themselves at the margins of society are more likely to react in an indignant manner to threatening rhetoric that seeks to devalue a whole group of people (see Bromell 2013). We propose that in the context of group-based rhetoric, these two emotions might be more reactive as social emotions and better predictors of changes to political attitudes (see Pérez 2015). In addition to testing the impact of policy proposals and candidates on emotions, we also test attitudinal and motivational impacts of these emotions. Our data allow us to look at how each of these negative emotions correlate and are distinct from each other.

We designed a survey experiment to test the impact that Trump and his proposals have on Latino emotions and political attitudes. Our design includes several experimental conditions where Donald Trump’s immigration policy proposals are attributed to different candidates (Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, other Republicans and a “Republican candidate”) in an effort to distinguish the effects of the proposals from reactions to his persona. Are the negative reactions to Donald Trump’s restrictive immigration proposals due to the policy themselves or due to Latinos reacting to Donald Trump?

The data for this study comes from three distinct samples of Texas respondents. The first is a pre-election survey experiment of students at several South Texas institutions (N=500). The second is an exit poll conducted in a border county in Texas (N=450). The last is a post-election survey experiment identical to the one conducted before the election on students from a large university in South Texas (N=200).

We use covariance structure analyses to explore the relationships between the four negative emotions in our surveys. The findings suggest that among Latinos, these emotions have unique covariances not found in other research (Marcus, Neuman and Mackuen 2015). Structural equation models are used to understand the mediation between our experimental conditions, emotions and political attitudes.

We find tentative evidence that Donald Trump is unique among our chosen candidates in eliciting negative emotions among Latinos. Our results also suggest that group-based appeals are likely to have important effects on a variety of political emotions and that these in turn can lead to increased engagement in politics. We are however cautious about our results due to the unique nature of our samples as well as the reliance on self-reports for most of our variables. We conclude by considering how the centrality of immigration in future elections could affect Latino turnout and political preferences.

Authors

• Guillermo Davila

• Angel Saavedra Cisneros, University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley