{"id":50585,"date":"2012-08-22T08:37:03","date_gmt":"2012-08-22T13:37:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=50585"},"modified":"2012-08-22T13:13:21","modified_gmt":"2012-08-22T18:13:21","slug":"testing-the-racializing-influence-of-romneys-welfare-ad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/08\/22\/testing-the-racializing-influence-of-romneys-welfare-ad\/","title":{"rendered":"Testing the Racializing Influence of Romney’s Welfare Ad"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally posted at YouGov<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Race has recently taken center stage in the presidential campaign.\u00a0 From Joe Biden\u2019s\u00a0suggestion<\/a>\u00a0that a Romney-Ryan presidency would re-enslave African-Americans, to some liberal commentators\u2019\u00a0contentions<\/a>\u00a0that the Romney campaign is using racial code words like \u201cwelfare\u201d and \u201canger\u201d to mobilize anti-black sentiments against President Obama, charges and counter-charges of playing the race card now abound.<\/p>\n

Part of this racialized turn in the campaign involves Romney\u2019s\u00a0welfare ad<\/a>\u00a0earlier this month\u2014an ad that\u00a0questionably<\/a>\u00a0accused Obama of ending welfare for work requirements.\u00a0 While that charge may seem race-neutral, there is a long-standing and strong association in white Americans\u2019 minds between welfare and \u201cundeserving\u201d African-Americans (see\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0here<\/a>).\u00a0 According to\u00a0Jonathan Chait<\/a>, then, \u201cthe political punch of this messaging derives from the fact that white middle-class Americans understand messages about redistribution from the hard-working middle-class to the lazy underclass in highly racialized terms.\u201d\u00a0 An extensive body of social science research described as racial priming seems to support Chait\u2019s contention.\u00a0 That research shows that such code words as \u201cwelfare\u201d and \u201cinner-city,\u201d especially when combined with racial imagery (e.g., the hardworking whites in Romney\u2019s ad), can make racial attitudes a more central determinant of political evaluations (see:\u00a01<\/a>,\u00a02<\/a>,\u00a03<\/a>,\u00a04<\/a>,\u00a05<\/a>).\u00a0 One might therefore expect the welfare ad to activate racial attitudes in public opinion.<\/p>\n

We can test that expectation thanks to some unique experimental data collected last week by YouGov.\u00a0 The survey randomly assigned half of its 1,000 respondents to view the Romney welfare ad (see above) while the remaining half of the sample did not see the ad.\u00a0 Respondents then answered a series of questions to discern whether and how the ad affected their opinions.\u00a0 Unfortunately, these follow-up questions did not include vote choice or candidate favorability, which were asked earlier in the survey.\u00a0 We did, however, ask respondents how well Mitt Romney and Barack Obama\u2019s policies would benefit the following groups in society: the poor, the middle class, the wealthy, African-Americans and white Americans.\u00a0 Answers were then recoded to range from 0 (\u201churt them a great deal\u201d) to 100 (\u201chelp them a great deal\u201d).<\/p>\n

The welfare ad did not appear to affect people\u2019s overall answers to those questions.\u00a0 However, it did make attitudes toward blacks a\u00a0stronger predictor<\/em>\u00a0of respondents’ views about the consequences of Romney\u2019s policies for the poor, the middle class, and African-Americans.\u00a0 To measure attitudes toward blacks, we use a scale called \u201cracial resentment\u201d in the scholarly literature.\u00a0 For respondents to this survey, we actually assessed racial resentment much earlier, when these respondents were first interviewed in a December 2011 survey.\u00a0 The four questions that make up this measure are\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The figure below shows that there was almost no relationship between racial resentment and the opinions of people who did not see the ad.\u00a0 But among those who saw it, racial resentment affected whether people thought Romney will help the poor, the middle class, and African-Americans.\u00a0 Moreover, seeing the ad did not activate other attitudes, such as party or ideological self-identification.\u00a0 It only primed racial resentment:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

(Note:<\/em>\u00a0Predicted values were calculated from OLS coefficients by setting partisanship, ideology, and race to their sample means.\u00a0\u00a0Source:<\/em>\u00a0YouGov Survey, August 2012)<\/p>\n

At the same time, the ad failed to \u201cracialize\u201d views of whether Romney\u2019s policies would benefit whites and the wealthy.\u00a0 This likely stems from the fact that Romney favorability ratings are strongly related to thinking his policies will help the poor, the middle class, and blacks, but only weakly related to believing he\u2019d help whites and the wealthy.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, the ad did not appear to further racialize the perceived consequences of Obama\u2019s policies, either.\u00a0 This is probably because racial attitudes are already linked to Obama, and a single political ad isn\u2019t enough to significantly strengthen an already strong relationship.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the results from our experiment suggest that ads like the one in this post may well contribute to the\u00a0growing polarization of public opinion by racial attitudes<\/a>\u00a0beyond the voting booth in the age of Obama.<\/p>\n

[I thank Brendan Nyhan for suggesting a study of this topic, and John Sides and Lynn Vavreck for help in designing the survey questions.]<\/em><\/p>\n

—————<\/p>\n

Michael Tesler<\/a>\u00a0is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brown University and co-author of\u00a0Obama\u2019s Race:The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally posted at YouGov. Race has recently taken center stage in the presidential campaign.\u00a0 From Joe Biden\u2019s\u00a0suggestion\u00a0that a Romney-Ryan presidency would re-enslave African-Americans, to some liberal commentators\u2019\u00a0contentions\u00a0that the Romney campaign is using racial code words like \u201cwelfare\u201d and \u201canger\u201d to mobilize anti-black sentiments against President Obama, charges and counter-charges of playing the race card now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1851,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23384,85,8121,285,1760,1757],"class_list":["post-50585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-politics","tag-election-2012","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans","tag-raceethnicity-whiteseuropeans"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1851"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50585"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50600,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50585\/revisions\/50600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}