Less a Foe, More a Friend?: Group Threat, Narratives, and Policy Opinion

• In Event: Rhetoric and Narrative in Policymaking

Abstract

Social groups are vital to politics. They serve as a foundation for political identity, they are often used in the public’s conceptualization of policy, and particular groups can be affected by policy in various ways. Groups also are a main source of political conflict – who gets what often comes down to which groups gets what. A great deal of work in political science and psychology shows ingroup and outgroup identity to be a common cause of strife. This becomes accentuated when one group perceives another as threatening—an idea coined as group threat.
The theory of group threat centers on the size of outgroups which are often racial or immigrant. A seminal study on this idea theorizes that the larger an outgroup is, the more an ingroup will perceive it to be a threat (Blumer 1958). Blumer shows that people within the ingroups view themselves as superior in every way, including size. As a result, the increase in the perceived size of the outgroup threatens the ingroup perceptions, causing it to grow more hostile to the outgroup.
More recent work builds on this idea (King and Wheelock 2007; Brader, Valentino, and Suhay 2008). For example, one study finds group threat present in the case of housing (Enos 2016). In light of the demolition of a public housing project in Chicago, some 25,000 African Americans were displaced from an area close to whites. The displacement of blacks in this study is shown to affect white voting behavior—the larger and closer whites were to this outgroup, the more likely they were to vote for conservative candidates. Once the housing projects were destroyed, the difference in voting preferences disappeared.
The bulk of this literature focuses on how the demographic size of the threatening group affects attitudes towards that group, emotions or general ideological identification (Huddy et al. 2005; D. M. Hjerm 2007; Craig and Richeson 2014). Virtually no work has looked at how group threat affects specific policy opinions – that is, instead of considering the impact on attitudes about groups, there may be effects on opposition or support for particular policies. Indeed, we know conceptions of groups can affect policy views, but we do not know if the size of the group affected by a policy can affect policy views. I investigate this idea in this project.
I test my hypotheses with a conjoint survey experiment focused on support for a minimum wage increase. Results show that when a threatening outgroup of policy beneficiaries grows in size, so does opposition to that policy. This result holds even in the face of a host of competing policy attributes. I also find, surprisingly, that narratives about the group actually even exacerbate policy opposition.

Author

• Andrew I Thompson, Northwestern University