The Race Card

by Mendelberg, Tali

• ISBN13: 9780691070711
• ISBN10: 0691070717
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-03-20
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. vii
List of Tables	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
The Origin of Implicit Racial Appeals	p. 1
A Theory of Racial Appeals	p. 3
The Norm of Racial Inequality Electoral Strategy and Explicit Appeals	p. 28
The Norm of Racial Equality Electoral Strategy and Implicit Appeals	p. 67
The Impact of Implicit Racial Appeals	p. 109
The Political Psychology of Implicit Communication	p. 111
Crafting Conveying and Challenging Implicit Racial Appeals: Campaign Strategy and News Coverage	p. 134
The Impact of Implicit Messages	p. 169
Implicit Explicit and Counter-Stereotypical Messages: The Welfare Experiment	p. 191
Psychological Mechanisms: The Norms Experiment	p. 209
Implications of Implicit Racial Appeals	p. 237
Implicit Communication beyond Race: Gender Sexual Orientation and Ethnicity	p. 239
Political Communication and Equality	p. 268
References	p. 277
Index	p. 299
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