The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality
328
The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality
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Overview
Did George Bush's use of the Willie Horton story during the1988 presidential campaign communicate most effectively when no one noticed its racial meaning? Do politicians routinely evoke racial stereotypes, fears, and resentments without voters' awareness? This controversial, rigorously researched book argues that they do. Tali Mendelberg examines how and when politicians play the race card and then manage to plausibly deny doing so.
In the age of equality, politicians cannot prime race with impunity due to a norm of racial equality that prohibits racist speech. Yet incentives to appeal to white voters remain strong. As a result, politicians often resort to more subtle uses of race to win elections. Mendelberg documents the development of this implicit communication across time and measures its impact on society. Drawing on a wide variety of research--including simulated television news experiments, national surveys, a comprehensive content analysis of campaign coverage, and historical inquiry--she analyzes the causes, dynamics, and consequences of racially loaded political communication. She also identifies similarities and differences among communication about race, gender, and sexual orientation in the United States and between communication about race in the United States and ethnicity in Europe, thereby contributing to a more general theory of politics.
Mendelberg's conclusion is that politicians--including many current state governors--continue to play the race card, using terms like "welfare" and "crime" to manipulate white voters' sentiments without overtly violating egalitarian norms. But she offers some good news: implicitly racial messages lose their appeal, even among their target audience, when their content is exposed.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400889181 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/09/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Theory of Racial Appeals
Americans remember the presidential election of 1988 as the Willie Horton election. A young black man convicted of murder and sentenced to life in a Massachusetts prison, Horton escaped while on furlough and assaulted a white couple in their home, raping the woman. George Bush made Horton a household name by repeatedly mentioning Horton's story and pinning the blame on his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. Several years after the election, when voters were asked what they remembered about the 1988 campaign, they provided three names: Dukakis, Bush, and Horton.
The Willie Horton message was obviously about race. Or was it? During nineteen of the twenty-two weeks of the campaign, no one in America seemed to think so. Bush and his aides spoke only about criminal justice, and they never mentioned Horton's race. Dukakis and his running mate, Lloyd Bentsen, said nothing about the racial element of the message. No other Democrat even hinted at the possibility that the message was racial. Journalists, too, seemed blind to the racial element of the story; not one of the hundreds of editorials, articles, or television news stories about Horton noted the racial aspect of the Horton appeal. Horton's race was repeatedly shown in menacing photos, but it was never spoken. Horton may as well have been French and his victims Swedish for all the notice his race drew.
Not so after October 21. On that day Jesse Jackson, the eminent civil rights activist who had been runner-up for the Democratic presidential nomination, accused the Bush campaign of using Horton with racial intent. The Horton story was an appeal to white voters' racial fears, Jackson charged; it was a political play on injurious stereotypes whites had developed about black men's proclivity to rape white women. From the moment Jackson made his charge, race pervaded media coverage of the Horton story and of the campaign. Bush and his campaign officials vehemently denied the charge of racism; Jackson and Bentsen (though not Dukakis) repeated it; and journalists and commentators considered whether the charge was true, most concluding that it was not.
Although he had finished the primary season far behind Dukakis in the polls, Bush's prospects shot up in June with his first mention of the Horton story. In October, when the Horton message reached its greatest intensity, Bush pulled ahead decisively. Soon after race entered the discussion, however, Bush's ratings began a steep slide. In the end, of course, Dukakis lost the election. The debate about race came too late to completely undo the effect of the Horton message. It was not until Bush's veto of the 1990 civil rights bill that Jackson's charge was adopted by journalists as the conventional interpretation of the Horton appeal. That the Willie Horton campaign was about race was obvious only three years after it transpired.
In the aftermath of the campaign, scholars and commentators concluded that Bush won through negative attacks that distorted the truth and mangled the issue of crime, attacks that Dukakis was too inept to counter. But for all that the Horton story has been vilified as the epitome of dirty campaigning, we still have not grasped the most significant aspect of the campaign: it communicated about race implicitly. In fact, the racial message was communicated most effectively when no one noticed its racial meaning. When people finally noticed, the racial message lost much of its power. Despite all that has been written about the 1988 election, it has gone unremarked that Bush's fortunes suffered just when race went from subtext to text.
The most important and underplayed lesson of the Horton message is that, in a racially divided society that aspires to equality, the injection of race into campaigns poses a great danger to democratic politics — so long as the injection of race takes place under cover. When a society has repudiated racism, yet racial conflict persists, candidates can win by playing the race card only through implicit racial appeals. The implicit nature of these appeals allows them to prime racial stereotypes, fears, and resentments while appearing not to do so. When an implicit appeal is rendered explicit — when other elites bring the racial meaning of the appeal to voters' attention — it appears to violate the norm of racial equality. It then loses its ability to prime white voters' racial predispositions. As a consequence, voters not only become more disaffected with the candidate, but also prevent their negative racial predispositions from influencing their opinion on issues of race. Political communication that derogates African Americans does little harm if it is widely, immediately, and strongly denounced. In an age of equality, what damages racial equality is the failure to notice the racial meaning of political communication, not the racial meaning itself.
The Horton story is not an isolated case. With more or less racial intent, many party officials, candidates, and campaign officials have conveyed implicitly racial appeals, and some have reaped the electoral benefits. The presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Richard Nixon in 1968 relied on implicitly racial appeals, the former driven by Goldwater's southern backers and the latter by Nixon's own ambition. Ronald Reagan came to political prominence nationally in part through his use of the welfare queen anecdote, perhaps not told with racial intent but likely with racial result. The 2000 presidential election featured the third presidential candidacy of Pat Buchanan, who in his infamous 1992 Republican National Convention speech attacked the behavior of inner-city residents, who are disproportionately black. In the 1996 primaries, Buchanan proved to be Bob Dole's main challenger, winning in New Hampshire and several other early states. He ardently defended South Carolina's practice of flying the Confederate flag above the state capitol as a symbol of southern heritage, and advocated building a wall at the border to restrict Mexican immigration, which he linked to welfare dependency and crime. Buchanan, however, has been the least successful of these presidential candidates, in part because he has been the least subtle. His use of the term "José" to refer to Mexican immigrants, his aides' well-publicized ties to anti-Semitic, paramilitary, and racist groups, and similar aspects of his campaigns led 54 percent of a national sample of Americans in 1996 to consider him too extreme.
The issues of welfare and crime have a long history of entanglement with race and a continuing salience in American politics. When officials disparage welfare recipients or focus attention on the perpetrators of violent crime, they often convey a racial message — not always intentionally, not always consciously, nor even inevitably. Still, they or their campaign aides sometimes consciously convey implicit racial meaning, and, regardless of the campaigners' intent and awareness, implicit racial meaning is often communicated by the media and received by voters.
Because candidates need not be fully intent on conveying a racial message, implicit racial messages are conveyed not only by conservative but by more moderate candidates, too. In 1994, when 42 percent of Americans named crime as the nation's worst problem, moderate Republican gubernatorial candidates in California (Pete Wilson), Illinois (Jim Edgar), and Texas (George W. Bush) ran ads showing blurry black-and-white images of (fictional) gun-toting rapists. Jim Edgar also ran an anti-welfare ad featuring African Americans. Getting tough on welfare dependency is a strategy that George W. Bush pursued during his 1998 gubernatorial reelection campaign in Texas.
Candidates for Senate, Congress, and lesser offices rely on implicit racial messages, too. David Duke, who ran as a Republican for the Senate and then for governor in Louisiana (followed by a run for president), is perhaps the best known and least successful in this category, having been unable to fully shed the baggage of his Ku Klux Klan past. James Glaser, in his recent study of competitive congressional elections in the South, found that in fact implicit racial messages are central to the Republican strategy and that, indeed, "some racial appeals seem to arise in nearly every election" (1996, 73).
Implicit racial appeals can be found in campaigns at all levels, and although they may be more evident in the South, they are not confined to that region. In northern states with a substantial racial minority, electoral campaigns often include implicit racial messages with oblique, subtle references to race. For example, in his 1999 reelection campaign, New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani put out a press release entitled, "Ruth Messinger Throws a Party for a Murderer," charging that his Democratic opponent had hosted a party for an inmate convicted of killing a guard during the racially charged Attica prison riots in 1971. Republican governors who have risen to prominence in recent years, such as Tom Ridge in Pennsylvania, Jeb Bush in Florida, and George Pataki in New York, all ran election campaigns that featured ads attacking their opponents for being lax on violent crime. These messages, by design or by circumstance, whether on their own or as conveyed by the news media, tended implicitly to refer to violent black criminals. Other prominent Republican governors were elected in part by highlighting their tough anti-welfare stance, a message that the media often conveys with visual references to African Americans. As the Republican party evaluated the reasons for its humiliating showing in the 1998 congressional elections, Republican governors argued that the party should move away from religious issues and focus in part, as the governors said they had done successfully in 1998 and before, on crime and welfare.
Thus some of our most salient political issues are entangled with race, and so are many of the campaign messages that discuss these issues. When public figures discuss matters of welfare or crime, they often — though not always — do so in a way that conveys derogatory references to African Americans. Often — though not always — these references are conveyed implicitly. To understand the relevance of race to the party system and to the conduct of electoral campaigns, implicitly racial communication must be understood. We must understand what makes a message implicit rather than explicit or nonracial. We must also understand the causes of implicit messages and their consequences. To understand when, how, and why implicit meaning exists in campaigns, and when, how, and why it does not, we must understand party strategy, norms, and voters' political psychology.
The power of implicitly racial appeals today is due to the coexistence of two contradictory elements in American politics: powerful egalitarian norms about race, and a party system based on the cleavage of race. Politicians convey racial messages implicitly when two contradictory conditions hold: (1) they wish to avoid violating the norm of racial equality, and (2) they face incentives to mobilize racially resentful white voters. White voters respond to implicitly racial messages when two contradictory conditions hold: (1) they wish to adhere to the norm of racial equality, and (2) they resent blacks' claims for public resources and hold negative racial stereotypes regarding work, violence, and sexuality. Today, these conditions hold for most Republican politicians and for many — arguably most — white voters. The contradiction among these conditions can be resolved most effectively through implicit racial communication. Politicians appeal to race implicitly because in order to win they need to mobilize whites' racial resentment while adhering to the norm of racial equality established during the 1960s. In other words, they face incentives to mobilize race in the age of equality. White voters respond to implicitly racial messages because they do not recognize these messages as racial and do not believe that their favorable response is motivated by racism. In fact, the racial reference in an implicit message, while subtle, is recognizable and works most powerfully through white voters' racial stereotypes, fears, and resentments.
To understand implicitly racial appeals, we need to understand the role of consciousness in public opinion — voters' consciousness of the racial meaning of a message and of their racial response to it. And we need to understand why elites might try to communicate indirectly rather than directly. Are the sender and receiver aware of the full meaning of an implicit message? Does the receiver know which of her own predispositions is activated by the message? These are general questions that matter for our understanding of public opinion, elections, and political communication. The case of racial politics, however, sharpens these questions like no other. Race is perhaps the central social cleavage of American political life. Yet American society has committed itself to making race irrelevant. The tension between the existence of racial conflict and the inability to express it produces indirect forms of communication, and makes consciousness a central variable in the political psychology of white citizens.
To understand why implicit appeals exist, why they work, and why they cease to work when they are explicit, we must understand the influence of racial stereotypes, fears, and resentments; party coalitions based on race; and the ability of a message to prime racial predispositions in white voters' minds. But while indispensable, these causes are insufficient. They cannot explain why a candidate would choose to convey a message under cover of some other issue. And they cannot explain why the candidate's supporters would respond more positively to an implicit message. Norms and consciousness are the necessary and missing factors. White Americans recognize that it is no longer acceptable to seem like a racist, not for elites or for citizens (Schuman et al. 1997; van Dijk 1991). Most people want to avoid not only the public perception that they are racist, but also thinking of themselves as racist. The norm of racial equality explains why racially conservative candidates seek to avoid the perception that their message is racial, and why their opposition's most effective strategy is to uncover the racial meaning of the message. Voters' awareness that the message violates the norm, and their awareness that their response to the message violates the norm, varies. This variation explains why the same voters respond to the message when it is hidden but repudiate it when it is obvious.
The history of racial norms reveals that as the racial norm changed during the twentieth century from inegalitarian to egalitarian, racial communication was transformed. The century began with highly explicit political communication about race, but as the century progressed, the explicit turned implicit. When the norm is inegalitarian, racial messages must be explicit to be effective. Otherwise, they fail to convey the commitment of the speaker to racial inequality. An inegalitarian norm causes white voters to expect candidates to establish racist credentials. Conversely, when the norm is egalitarian, explicit messages backfire, and only implicit messages, which appear to adhere to the norm, can succeed. When an egalitarian norm prevails, an inverse relationship exists between the explicitness of the message and its effectiveness in mobilizing voters, and a direct relationship exists between the implicitness of the message and its effectiveness. The reason is that voters can respond to the racial meaning of a message without being aware that the message has a racial meaning or that they are responding to that meaning. Without understanding the relationship between elections, norms, communication, and consciousness, and the dynamics of that relationship, it is difficult to evaluate just what has changed and what remains the same in the politics of race. To understand these dynamics is to understand the ongoing mobilization of race in the age of equality.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Race Card"
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Copyright © 2001 Princeton University Press.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations viiList of Tables ix
Preface xi
PART ONE: THE ORIGIN OF IMPLICIT RACIAL APPEALS 1
Chapter 1. A Theory of Racial Appeals 3
Chapter 2. The Norm of Racial Inequality Electoral Strategy and Explicit Appeals 28
Chapter 3. The Norm of Racial Equality Electoral Strategy and Implicit Appeals 67
PART TWO: THE IMPACT OF IMPLICIT RACIAL APPEALS 109
Chapter 4. The Political Psychology of Implicit Communication 111
Chapter 5. Crafting Conveying and Challenging Implicit Racial Appeals: Campaign Strategy and News Coverage 134
Chapter 6. The Impact of Implicit Messages 169
Chapter 7. Implicit Explicit and Counter-Stereotypical Messages: The Welfare Experiment 191
Chapter 8. Psychological Mechanisms: The Norms Experiment 209
PART THREE: IMPLICATIONS OF IMPLICIT RACIAL APPEALS 237
Chapter 9. Implicit Communication beyond Race: Gender Sexual Orientation and Ethnicity 239
Chapter 10. Political Communication and Equality 268
References 277
Index 299
What People are Saying About This
The author uses a wonderful variety of empirical data to track the evolution of political rhetoric about race from the Civil War to the present. This book has the potential to be a pioneering volume,moving beyond other accounts of how race influences mass politics in the contemporary era.
"The author uses a wonderful variety of empirical data to track the evolution of political rhetoric about race from the Civil War to the present. This book has the potential to be a pioneering volume, moving beyond other accounts of how race influences mass politics in the contemporary era."—David O. Sears, University of California, Los Angeles"This is an absolutely wonderful book—a fascinating, well-written account of the author's path-breaking research. It is controversial but convincing and will be of interest to a wide audience. . . . The book will surely make an important mark in political science, communications, and African-American studies. By all rights it should also shape the way the news media cover politics and—as a consequence—the way political campaigns are conducted. The work is both deeply rooted in well-developed research traditions and thoroughly new in what is has to offer."—Martin Gilens, Yale University
This is an absolutely wonderful book—a fascinating, well-written account of the author's path-breaking research. It is controversial but convincing and will be of interest to a wide audience. . . . The book will surely make an important mark in political science, communications, and African-American studies. By all rights it should also shape the way the news media cover politics and—as a consequence—the way political campaigns are conducted. The work is both deeply rooted in well-developed research traditions and thoroughly new in what is has to offer.
— Martin Gilens, Yale University
The author uses a wonderful variety of empirical data to track the evolution of political rhetoric about race from the Civil War to the present. This book has the potential to be a pioneering volume, moving beyond other accounts of how race influences mass politics in the contemporary era.
— David O. Sears, University of California, Los Angeles
This is an absolutely wonderful book--a fascinating,well-written account of the author's path-breaking research. It is controversial but convincing and will be of interest to a wide audience. . . . The book will surely make an important mark in political science,communications,and African-American studies. By all rights it should also shape the way the news media cover politics and--as a consequence--the way political campaigns are conducted. The work is both deeply rooted in well-developed research traditions and thoroughly new in what is has to offer.