Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Studies in Communication, Media, and Public Opinion) [Martin Gilens] on.
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- Racial Priming with Implicit and Explicit Messages
- Racial Priming with Implicit and Explicit Messages - Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics
Most Americans hold both of these sets of views simultaneously, but they are not always in equipoise. Two variables that we know influence opinions about poverty and poor people are the state of the economy and racial attitudes. During periods of economic prosperity, such as during the Clinton years, individualism and personal responsibility values tend to trump the belief in shared responsibility.
When the economy worsens, a sense of shared responsibility typically increases and the public is more disposed to support spending on public assistance. The effect of economic conditions is limited, however. Attitudes since , for example, have not changed as much as one might expect. As two close observers of public opinion point out:. There is little indication that beliefs in individualism, the efficacy of hard work, and the potential for personal progress have been seriously eroded by the economic body blows the American public has absorbed over the past four years.
A fierce national debate about welfare was taking place during those years, which culminated in the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity and Reconciliation Act of Significantly, perceptions of the work ethic of African Americans were strongly related to attitudes about welfare spending. The race—welfare connection and the racialization of poverty continue to influence how Americans think about poor people and the kinds of programs and policies they are willing to support.
The forecast, however, is not all bleak. First, disquiet is growing over the widening gap between rich and poor. The Great Recession, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Obama—Romney contest, and the accompanying media coverage have drawn attention to the issue of income and wealth inequality, and the American public believes this inequality gap is larger than ever. Furthermore, a majority of Americans thinks the government should do more to narrow the gap. Although narrowing the gap between rich and poor is not the same as addressing poverty or helping poor people, it still indicates an increasing sensitivity to the lack of equal economic opportunity in America and the desire to do something about it.
Second, there have been some changes in how poor people are perceived. This represents a point shift since , when only 49 percent thought so, and 44 percent thought most poor people did not work. Millennials are the most diverse generation in U. In , nearly 9 in 10 young adults ages 18—24 87 percent were non-Hispanic whites. Now, just about 6 in 10 are white. Sixty-seven percent of toyear-olds agree that increasing ethnic and racial diversity is a good thing, compared to 61 percent of the population overall who think so. Millennials are also more likely than other age groups to believe that the government should do more to solve problems; 59 percent of Millennials think so compared to only 45 percent of those between the ages of 35 and The public opinion section of this report is based on a meta-analysis of attitudinal tracking surveys and recent public opinion studies by nationally known and reputable research organizations, media outlets, and issue groups.
Most of the data examined are publicly available; some come from proprietary research that was made available to The Opportunity Agenda for the purposes of this report. Indeed, explicit messages that target audiences less wedded to the norm of racial equality, such as white southerners, Republicans, and the poorly educated, are likely to activate racial attitudes—especially old-fashioned racism—in mass political beliefs. That increased focus on race easily could have primed racial attitudes in mass assessments of Barack Obama, as the racial priming hypothesis would suggest.
Racial attitudes, it turns out, were quite difficult to prime or deactivate in mass assessments of Barack Obama during his campaigns and presidency. This spillover of racialization from Barack Obama into related opinions has almost certainly polarized political preferences by racial predispositions more broadly than the well-documented effects of race-coded communications in previous racial priming research.
As mentioned in the discussion of racial priming with explicit and implicit messages, the norm of racial equality may not be as universally held as is often portrayed in social science research. Yet, the vast majority of whites still reject openly discriminatory treatment of, and overtly racist views about, African Americans Schuman et al. The same, however, cannot be said about attitudes toward every minority group in the United States. In particular, Muslims and undocumented immigrants are viewed much less favorably than just about any racial, ethnic, and religious group in contemporary American society Kalkan et al.
Both groups are, therefore, particularly vulnerable to explicit political attacks from politicians seeking to attract ethnocentric support from the substantial number of Americans who hold anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments. Since whites evaluate African Americans much more favorably than Muslims and undocumented immigrants, explicit appeals against the latter two groups should be more palatable to the public than anti-black appeals to racial antagonisms. Consistent with that expectation, there does indeed seem to have been a turn toward anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant appeals in recent election campaigns.
Those explicit appeals appeared to be quite successful, too. Nevertheless, there has been little research up to this point that systematically tests how effective implicit and explicit appeals against these two groups are at activating outgroup antagonisms. Nor have researchers identified how communications could deactivate animosities toward the groups in political beliefs. Therefore, understanding how anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant messages compare to the substantial body of work on racial priming detailed above should make for an especially fruitful research agenda in the years ahead. Do anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant appeals hold the same capacity as race-based cues to activate outgroup attitudes in public opinion?
Do explicit appeals against Muslims and undocumented immigrants have the same potential as explicitly racist messages to backfire by violating strong societal norms of racial equality? Is it possible for mass communications to deactivate the importance of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments in American politics with counterstereotypical cues, the same way that media content showing white criminals and white welfare recipients has neutralized the political impact of anti-black attitudes in prior racial priming research?
Indeed, the answers to these questions have broad implications for understanding whether political communications will increase the existing conflict between social groups in American politics or bridge the divide between the political preferences of racial, religious, and ethnic groups in an increasingly multicultural America. For several good reasons, priming research has focused heavily on how race-coded messages activate attitudes about African Americans in public opinion. The upshot of this sustained research agenda has been an extensive body of racial priming results that have unusually strong implications for American politics.
Racial attitudes are emotionally charged in ways that nonracial ideological predispositions, like limited government, are not Banks, So the increased impact of the attitudes in American politics produced by racial priming makes for a particularly explosive political atmosphere. Despite more than a generation of racial priming research, though, there is still much to learn. There are unanswered questions about the relative effectiveness of different types of race cues and how the racial priming framework may or may not transfer over to political appeals against other minority groups.
There are also unexplored questions about how minority groups—in particular, Latinos and Asian Americans—respond to political appeals against both African American and other racial and ethnic groups. Understanding how different racial and ethnic groups respond to political appeals against various racial and ethnic groups is especially important in an increasinlgly multicultural America and should therefore set the agenda for the next generation of research on racial priming with implicit and explicit messages.
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