As the number of COVID-19 cases rose in the US and around the world in early 2020, conservative elites in the US racialized the pandemic, referring to the coronavirus as the "Chinese flu" or the "Wuhan virus." Existing research suggests that this linking of the viral pandemic to a social group will "activate" anti-Asian attitudes in the mass public, helping bring those attitudes to bear on behaviors and attitudes related to COVID-19. Despite anecdotal evidence of a spike in discriminatory behavior targeted at Asians across western countries, little empirical evidence for this "othering" hypothesis exists. Using a large survey (n = 4311) benchmarked to national demographics, we analyze the relationship between attitudes toward Asian Americans, xenophobia, concern about contracting the coronavirus, and a variety of behavioral outcomes and policy attitudes. We find evidence that anti-Asian attitudes are associated with concern about the virus but also with xenophobic behaviors and policy preferences. These relationships are unique to Asian American attitudes, are not related to attitudes toward other outgroups, and do not hold for a variety of placebo outcomes. Together our findings suggest that anti-Asian attitudes were activated and were associated with a variety of COVID-19 attitudes and behaviors in the early stages of the pandemic.
Following trends in Europe over the past decade, support for the Radical Right has recently grown more significant in the United States and the United Kingdom. While the United Kingdom has witnessed the rise of Radical Right fringe groups, the United States’ political spectrum has been altered by the Tea Party and the election of Donald Trump. This article asks what predicts White individuals’ support for such groups. In original, representative surveys of White individuals in Great Britain and the United States, we use an innovative technique to measure subjective social, political, and economic status that captures individuals’ perceptions of increasing or decreasing deprivation over time. We then analyze the impact of these deprivation measures on support for the Radical Right among Republicans (Conservatives), Democrats (Labourites), and Independents. We show that nostalgic deprivation among White respondents drives support for the Radical Right in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Does social protest following the police killing of unarmed Black civilians have a widespread “opinion-mobilizing” effect against the police? Or, does the racialized nature of these events polarize mass opinion based on standing racial and political orientations? To answer these questions, we use a large dataset comprised of weekly cross sections of the American public and employ a regression discontinuity in time (RDiT) approach leveraging the random timing of the police killing of George Floyd and ensuing nationwide protests. We find that the Floyd protests swiftly decreased favorability toward the police and increased perceived anti-Black discrimination among low-prejudice and politically liberal Americans. However, attitudes among high-prejudice and politically conservative Americans either remained unchanged or evinced only small and ephemeral shifts. Our evidence suggests that the Floyd protests served to further racialize and politicize attitudes within the domain of race and law enforcement in the U.S.
In the aftermath of Donald Trump's 2016 electoral college victory, journalists focused heavily on the white working class (WWC) and the relationship between economic anxiety, racial attitudes, immigration attitudes, and support for Trump. One hypothesized but untested proposition for Donald Trump's success is that his unorthodox candidacy, particularly his rhetoric surrounding economic marginalization and immigration, shifted WWC voters who did not vote Republican in 2012 into his coalition. Using a large national survey we examine 1) whether racial and immigration attitudes or economic dislocation and marginality were the main correlates of vote switching, and; 2) whether this phenomenon was isolated among the white working class. We find a non-trivial number of white voters switched their votes in the 2016 election to Trump or Clinton, that this vote switching was more associated with racial and immigration attitudes than economic factors, and that the phenomena occurred among both working class and non-workingclass whites, though many more working-class whites switched than non-working class whites. Our findings suggest that racial and immigration attitudes may be continuing to sort white voters into new partisan camps and further polarize the parties.
Despite a sizable literature on racial priming, scholars have failed to account for the shifting nature of racial appeals. First, theories of racial priming have not yet been widely applied to increasingly common anti‐immigrant and anti‐Latino political appeals. Second, theories of racial priming have not adequately accounted for both an increasingly racialized political climate and increased tolerance for explicit anti‐minority appeals. In two survey experiments fielded both before Trump's rise and after his presidential victory, we find the Implicit‐Explicit (IE) model always fails for anti‐black appeals, sometimes fails for anti‐immigrant appeals, but consistently holds for anti‐Latino appeals. While we find the null effects of implicit versus explicit anti‐black and anti‐immigrant appeals are partly driven by tolerance for the explicit appeals, we also find evidence that white Americans are adept at recognizing the racial content of appeals featuring widely used, congruent issue‐group pairs. Our findings shed light on conditions under which the IE model does and does not hold in the current political era.
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