White Man's Burden: Understanding Racialized Paternalism

• In Event: Political Affect and Racialized Groups

Abstract

Scholars of political behavior and race have overlooked the way that paternalism impacts political attitudes. There is considerable evidence that elites wield paternalism against subaltern groups in society (Jackman, 1994; Soss, Fording & Schram, 2012). There is much less evidence of how this paternalism plays out in the mass public. Building on the stereotype content model I construct a measure of racial paternalism by interacting simple measures of affect for an out-group and negative stereotypes for that same out-group. I argue that racial paternalism is a stable disposition in the mass public, a bias rooted in neutral or positive affect, which leads it's adherents to behave paternalistically only with regard to the key out-group. Strategic elites cynically deploy paternalistic appeals to achieve their policy goals and to convince racially liberal members of the public who nonetheless hold negative stereotypes about key out-groups to support racially conservative policy. In order to demonstrate this phenomenon, I use a survey experiment to examine the degree to which paternalistic appeals drive racial paternalists support paternalistic policy. Specifically, I provide respondents with an elite paternalistic appeal for drug testing welfare recipients and alternate the race and class of the intended target of the policy. I demonstrate that racial paternalism with regard to blacks uniquely drives support for paternalistic policy when it is explicitly targeting blacks.

Author

• Steven Moore, University of Michigan