Attention Shifts: Why White Nationalist Organizations Focus on Issues of Borders and Immigration

• In Event: 3551 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 14. Racialized and Gendered Representations

Abstract

Why do white nationalist organizations (WNOs) focus attention on the issues they do? I draw from cognitive social science, social movement studies, and organizational studies to explain why WNOs shift attention over time to one particular grievance domain: borders- and immigration-related issues. I argue that WNOs are more likely to shift attention to borders and immigration when there is a grievance-validating external shock that is likely to be interpreted as a threat. This is more likely to be the case for WNOs located in contexts that make it easy to link immigration-terror stereotypes to their community. Using a unique dataset of digitized WNO literature between 1980 and 2008 and a combination of computational text analysis, network analysis, and statistical modeling, I find support for this hypothesis. White nationalist organizations in this sample were more likely to shift attention to borders and immigration when there was a high number of non-right-wing terror events in the U.S. relative to the size of the organization's non-Hispanic/Latinx community in a given year, but only when the organization was more likely to construe threats as proximate. I conclude by discussing the larger implications of the argument and results.

Author

• Marshall A Taylor, New Mexico State University