The Conditions Ripe for Racial Spillover Effects

Abstract

A growing body of research shows that Barack Obama's rise to prominence has further polarized mass politics by racial attitudes and race—a phenomenon we have described elsewhere as the spillover of racialization. There is still much that remains unknown about source‐cue spillover effects in general and the spillover of racialization in particular. This study helps fill that void by drawing on prior research in political psychology and several new empirical examples to address lingering questions that have not been adequately answered. Those new empirical analyses suggest that issues that are already strongly influenced by racial attitudes, issues that the public has strong opinions about, and issues where Obama cross‐pressures Americans with racially conservative positions are all less likely to racialize in response to the president's visible positions. I also show that low‐information Americans and Democrats are most susceptible to racial spillover effects. Finally, the extant evidence suggests that the source‐cue spillover effects can have lasting impacts on public opinion and that the races, religions, and genders of other prominent elite sources can also activate group‐based considerations in mass opinion formation.

Gender Policy Feedback: Perceptions of Sex Equity, Title IX, and Political Mobilization among College Athletes

“…General gender discrimination attitudes tend to be quite stable as they reflect fundamental values and ideology; in discussing the related gender traditionalism scale (i.e., which includes more overt items than we use), McThomas and Tesler (2016, 35) state that it is "quite stable over time at the individual level. Moreover, stable predispositions, such as gender attitudes, rarely change in accordance with mass assessments of well-known political figures (Tesler 2015)" [or in our case, we presume issues]. Thus, we are confident that the causal direction flows from this general battery to perceptions of equality in sports (and not vice versa) and that the inclusion of the latter did not substantially impact answers to the former.…”

Racial Resentment, Hurricane Sandy, and the Spillover of Racial Attitudes into Evaluations of Government Organizations

“…A significant body of research demonstrates that subtle racial cues can lead people to rely on their racial attitudes when forming candidate evaluations (Mendelberg, ) and views on key political issues (Tesler & Sears, ; Tesler, ; ). Our research extends this work in a few key ways.…”

“…Recently, scholars have shown that the election of Barack Obama to the presidency has led to the association between racial attitudes and a host of previously nonracial policy areas, such as health care reform (Tesler, , ; Tesler & Sears, ). The “spillover” of race into these domains is predicated on two features of the contemporary political environment.…”

Medicaid Expansion and the Political Fate of the Governors Who Support It

“…Not only have attitudes toward healthcare become increasingly “welfarized,” they have also become “racialized.” In a series of studies, Tesler () argued that source cues provided by Barack Obama’s race have caused what he terms a “spillover of racialization.” That is, Americans’ racial attitudes became more strongly connected with evaluations of Obama as a candidate and a president, and as a result attitudes toward blacks have “spilled over” to become more strongly related to the policies with which Obama is identified, including “Obamacare.” Specifically, he argues, this spillover of racialization has caused many Americans to evaluate health policy in more racialized terms, and that this has had a significant influence on support for the ACA. And as Grogan and Park () demonstrate, this racialization has impacted support for Medicaid expansion as well.…”