When are Racist Appeals Effective? Examining the Role of Perceived Group Threat

• In Event: The Politics of Racial Prejudice

Abstract

Political appeals that overtly invoke race are more common in America than they used to be. This increase is surprising, since previous studies in political communication and racial priming suggest that when citizens see race explicitly being invoked in political appeals, they reject the message, and its persuasive power is neutralized (e.g. Mendelberg 2001; Valentino, Hutchings, & White 2002). A recent study by Valentino, Neuner, and Vandenbroek (2018) highlights that something has changed: in a series of experiments, white participants no longer rejected overt racial appeals in the way they once did.

I present a series of studies that examine why white Americans no longer reject overtly racial political messages. I test hypotheses derived from the theory of white racial threat, which hints at reasons why explicit appeals activate racial attitudes now in a way they previously could not. A threat that is increased or perceived as more credible leads to increases in the expression of prejudice (e.g. Craig & Richeson 2014a; Craig & Richeson 2014b; Huddy, Feldman, Taber & Lahav 2005) and may increase the likelihood that the majority would want to act in a more extreme way to preserve their dominance. This activated prejudice then may make whites more apt to ignore any adherence to a norm of equality, and instead accept negative, explicit, racial content.

The evidence to be presented draws from two pre-registered experiments — one conducted on a convenience sample, and one conducted on a diverse national sample — in the winter of 2019. In the studies, participants reported their racial attitudes and perceptions of status threat. Then, after a delay of several weeks (to address demand effects), participants read a fabricated news article that either reports on the impending majority-minority status of the United States, or the slowed growth of the minority population. The first treatment is intended to heighten status threat while the second is intended to allay threat. All respondents then view and evaluate an explicit, negative, racial appeal in the form of a political flyer.

Initial results from the convenience sample suggest that heightened levels of perceived group threat make respondents rely more heavily on their racial attitudes in their evaluation of an explicit appeal – but that this relationship may be mediated by the emotions induced by the article that they read as a treatment.

Works Cited:

Craig, Maureen A. and Jennifer A. Richeson. 2014a. “On the precipice of a majority-minority America: Perceived status threat from the racial demographic shift affects White Americans’ political ideology.” Psychological Science 25 (6): 1189-1197.

Craig, Maureen A., and Jennifer A. Richeson. 2014b. “More diverse yet less tolerant? How the increasingly diverse racial landscape affects white Americans’ racial attitudes.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 40 (6): 750-761.

Huddy, Leonie, Stanley Feldman, Charles Taber, and Gallya Lahav. 2005. "Threat, anxiety, and support of antiterrorism policies." American Journal of Political Science (49) 3: 593-608.

Mendelberg, Tali. 2001. The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality. Princeton University Press.

Valentino, Nicholas A., Fabian G. Neuner, and Matthew L. Vandenbroek. 2018. “The Changing Norms of Racial Political Rhetoric and the End of Racial Priming.” The Journal of Politics 80(3): 000-000.

Valentino, Nicholas A., Vincent L. Hutchings, and Ismail K. White. 2002. “Cues that Matter: How Political Ads Prime Racial Attitudes During Campaigns.” American Political Science Review 96(1): 75-90.

Author

• Leah Christiani, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill