TRENDS: Economic Interests Cause Elected Officials to Liberalize Their Racial Attitudes

Abstract

Do attitudes of elected officials toward racial issues change when the issues are portrayed as economic? Traditionally, scholars have presented Confederate symbols as primarily a racial issue: elites supporting their eradication from public life tend to emphasize the association of Confederate symbols with slavery and institutionalized racism, while those elected officials who oppose the removal of Confederate symbols often cite the heritage of white southerners. In addition to these racial explanations, we argue that there is an economic component underlying support for removal of Confederate symbols among political elites. Racial issues can also be economic issues, and framing a racial issue as an economic issue can change elite attitudes. In the case of removal of Confederate symbols, the presence of such imagery is considered harmful to business. Two survey experiments of elected officials in eleven U.S. southern states show that framing the decision to remove Confederate symbols as good for business causes those elected officials to favor removing the Confederate flag from public spaces. Elected officials can be susceptible to framing, just like regular citizens.

The (Missing?) Role of Institutions in Behavioral Public Administration

“…Public administrators and public officials exhibit racial and ethnic biases (Acolin, Bostic, & Painter, 2016;Butler & Broockman, 2011;Costa, 2017;Dinesen, Dahl, & Schiloer, 2021;Einstein & Glick, 2017;Giulietti, Tonin, & Vlassopoulos, 2015;Jenkins, Landgrave, & Martinez, 2020;Jilke, Van Dooren, & Rys, 2018;Mendez & Grose, 2018;Pfaff et al, 2020;Riccucci & Van Ryzin, 2016;Rodriguez & Rossel, 2018). There is also evidence that the attitudes of public officials are susceptible to social psychological cues (Grose et al, 2021;Jilke & Tummers, 2018), framing (Grose & Peterson, 2020;Sheffer et al, 2018), and other behavioral nudges (Avellaneda, 2013;Jilke, Van de Walle, & Kim, 2015;James, John, & Moseley, 2017;Richardson & John, 2021).…”

Heritage Versus Hate: Assessing Opinions in the Debate over Confederate Monuments and Memorials

“…These studies do not imply that elite opinions and positions on the flag are intractable, however. For instance, in a novel survey experiment of county officials in the South, Grose and Peterson (2020) and Peterson and Grose (2017) find that Republican elected officials can be swayed to favor removal if it is framed as likely to yield economic benefits. Of course, the grander story of the white South's realignment to the GOP speaks to the remarkable partisan reversal of attitudes toward the Confederate legacy (see Cooper et al., 2020).…”

Does issue framing shape support for COVID-19 lockdown measures? Evidence from a survey experiment in Peru

“…Previous research has established that social and cultural issues can be framed in terms of economic consequences, and those economic frames can lead to attitude changes both at the mass and at the elite level (Chong et al, 2001;Chong and Marshall, 1999;Malhotra and Newman, 2017). For instance, both citizens and government officials are more likely to support the removal of Confederate symbols in southern U.S. states when the decision is presented as good for business (Grose and Peterson, 2020). Building on that theoretical scaffolding and those earlier findings, we argue that an economic framing might change respondents' self-interest from concerns about public health (the likely baseline in May 2020) toward concerns about the economic consequences of the pandemic.…”