Explicit Racial Appeals and Perceptions of Threat in US House Elections

• In Event: Race and Ethnicity in the Legislature

Abstract

Political appeals that overtly invoke race do not experience the same level of backlash from whites that they used to (Valentino, Neuner, and Vandenbroek 2018). Further, it seems like explicit appeals are on the rise. Politicians appear to be talking more – and more overtly – about race and identity in American politics than they have in the recent past. However, we have yet to systematically document and analyze the use of explicit, identity-based political appeals in an observational context. When are these appeals made? Do they help candidates win elections?

To answer these questions, I created an original dataset that codes congressional advertisements for their references to identity. With this, I am able to test hypotheses derived from theories of status threat. When members of a majority group perceive a threat to their status (even when one does not objectively exist), they may be more willing to accept negative, explicit appeals that denigrate minorities – as their willingness to express prejudice is heightened (e.g. Craig & Richeson 2014a; Craig & Richeson 2014b; Huddy, Feldman, Taber & Lahav 2005). So, in congressional districts in which perceptions of threat are particularly high, politicians may be more likely to turn to negative, explicit appeals to activate constitutents’ prejudice and galvanize support.

The evidence to be presented draws from supplemental coding of data collected by the Wesleyan Media Project. A team of research assistants and I watched all 2016 House advertisements and coded them for their references to identity (N=1,991 unique advertisements; 621,556 total observations). Then, the occurrence of explicit, negative, identity-based appeals (e.g. denigrations of racial minority groups) in an election is predicted with the level of perceived racial threat in that district. The level of perceived threat is estimated using MRP with 2016 CCES data.

With this data, I test two expectations. The first is that heightened levels of perceived threat will lead to increases in the use of negative, explicit racial appeals by politicians. The second expectation is that the use of negative, explicit appeals will lead to electoral gains in districts with high levels of perceived threat.

References:
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.

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.

Author

• Leah Christiani, University of Tennessee