Who is Called by the Dog Whistle? Political Ideology Conditions Responses to Racially-Encoded Messages

• In Event: 4354 - Social Psychology

Abstract

Do political appeals which subtly invoke negative stereotypes of racial minorities shift whites’ views of policies and candidates by harnessing their racial prejudice? Though widely-cited in academic and popular discourse, prior work finds conflicting evidence for this “dog-whistle hypothesis.” To test the hypothesis, we conducted an online survey experiment of white Americans (N=899) that involved a pretest measuring respondents’ racial attitudes roughly two weeks before they participated in an ostensibly unrelated study in which they read an implicit racial message opposing welfare programs, an explicit racial message opposing welfare programs, or a control message. Overall, participants who read the implicit racial message reported greater opposition to welfare programs than participants who read the control message. We further found that liberals high in racial resentment showed the strongest increases in welfare opposition in response to the implicit racial message. A follow-up experiment of white Americans (N=898) with the same design tested the effects of messages supporting a political position – gun control – not currently strongly linked with negative stereotypes of minorities. Again, liberals high in racial resentment showed significant increases in support for the targeted issue in the implicit racial message condition. We discuss interpretations of this pattern, including that racially resentful liberals may be particularly responsive to implicit racial appeals because they hold negative racial stereotypes but also are motivated to appear egalitarian. In addition, norms of color-blindness in liberal political culture may impair the development of structural explanations of negative outcomes among black Americans, leaving liberals ill-equipped to rebuff messages linking these outcomes to negative racial stereotypes.

Authors

• Rachel Wetts, University of California-Berkeley

• Robb Willer, Stanford University