Ismail K. White

Cues that Matter: How Political Ads Prime Racial Attitudes During Campaigns

Recent evidence suggests that elites can capitalize on preexisting linkages between issues and social groups to alter the criteria citizens use to make political decisions. In particular, studies have shown that subtle racial cues in campaign communications may activate racial attitudes, thereby altering the foundations of mass political decision making. However, the precise psychological mechanism by which such attitudes are activated has not been empirically demonstrated, and the range of implicit cues powerful enough to produce this effect is still unknown. In an experiment, we tested whether subtle racial cues embedded in political advertisements prime racial attitudes as predictors of candidate preference by making them more accessible in memory. Results show that a wide range of implicit race cues can prime racial attitudes and that cognitive accessibility mediates the effect. Furthermore, counter-stereotypic cues—especially those implying blacks are deserving of government resources—dampen racial priming, suggesting that the meaning drawn from the visual/narrative pairing in an advertisement, and not simply the presence of black images, triggers the effect.

A latino on the ballot: Explaining coethnic voting among latinos and the response of white Americans

In recent campaigns, candidates have sought to attract votes from the growing Latino electorate through ethnic cues. Yet, we know very little about the impact of appeals to ethnicity. This article examines the role that ethnic cues play in shaping the political opinions and choices of Latinos, as well as the response of non-Hispanic White Americans (Anglos). We take up the simplest of group cues, the ethnicity of the candidate. We argue that candidate ethnicity is an explicit ethnic cue that alters the political choices of Latinos through priming of their ethnic linked fate, but only affects Anglos through spreading activation of primed ethnic attitudes to national identity considerations. Evidence from an experiment that manipulated exposure to candidate ethnicity information provides evidence for these claims. Our results help to explain coethnic voting among Latinos and resistance to Latino candidates among Anglos.

FEELING THE PAIN OF MY PEOPLE Hurricane Katrina, Racial Inequality, and the Psyche of Black America

In late August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina ripped through the U.S. Gulf Coast region causing a subsequent cycle of evacuation, relocation, and rebuilding. The storm exposed in its wake vast racial and class differences in how the hurricane and its aftermath affected individual citizens. Using two public opinion polls conducted immediately after Katrina, the authors demonstrate that African Americans in this country were much more likely than Whites to experience feelings of anger and depression in response to the events surrounding the hurricane. They also show that these feelings of anger and depression held by African Americans are respectively explained by their perception of racial discrimination by the federal government and complacency on the part of President Bush in response to Katrina. These results provide additional support for the idea that African Americans have a racially group-centric view of society that powerfully shapes how they respond to political events.

Racial Cues in Campaign News: The Effects of Candidate Strategies on Group Activation and Political Attentiveness among African Americans

Decades of scholarship in the field of electoral behavior have established that the chief influence of campaigns is to reinforce or activate latent predispositions so that voters behave consistently with their underlying interests (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954; Campbell et al. 1960; Finkel 1993; Gelman and King 1993; Klapper 1960; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944; Patterson and McClure 1976; Petrocik 1996; Zaller 1992). Little attention, however, has been devoted to identifying the specific process by which activation occurs. In particular, we have yet to identify specific catalysts, in the swirling confusion of campaign communication, for activating latent preferences.

Black Candidates and Black Turnout: A Study of Viability in Louisiana Mayoral Elections

What effect does a candidate’s race have on coracial voter turnout? Recent studies have found mixed results, largely because it is difficult to separate the effect of candidate race from other factors that drive voter turnout. We argue that viability is a key element in the theory of turnout among coracial voters that has been overlooked in the extant literature. We develop a broad-based concept of candidate viability that is dependent on both the candidate and the electoral environment. To test this hypothesis, we make use of the unique runoff structure of mayoral elections in the state of Louisiana between 1988 and 2011. We argue that runoff elections heighten viability in ways rarely seen in most elections. We find that while there is an effect of candidate race on black turnout in general elections, the effect is much more robust in runoff elections.

Framing race and class in Brazil: Afro-Brazilian support for racial versus class policy

Because of the strong correlation between race and class in Brazil, it has been difficult for scholars to assess the degree to which either provides Brazilians with politically relevant identities. The impacts of race and class are compared with a priming experiment using Afro-Brazilian subjects. The results indicate that subjects identifying as blacks are more responsive than non-black subjects to racial primes, resulting in stronger support for government intervention aimed at racial rather than class inequality. Relevant comparisons to race in the USA are discussed.

Introduction: Defining African-American Political Psychology

Recently, political science has experienced an upsurge in the number of volumes devoted to the study of political psychology. Bridging theories of cognition, personality, and intergroup relations with the study of the way individuals interact with the political world, this line of research has furthered our knowledge of the psychology of political decision-making, socialization, opinion formation, and behavior. Nevertheless, most of the findings yielded from extant studies are based on White Americans. Decades of research in both political science and psychology have demonstrated that external, environmental factors influence individuals’ mental processes, especially as they relate to politics. Inasmuch as such factors vary systematically across racial and ethnic groups, the political psychology of these groups warrants study. Thus, we begin the extension of the current literature by applying it to African Americans.

Feeling Different:Racial Group-Based Emotional Response to Political Events

The racial divide in American politics is a large and enduring one. To be sure, attitudes about race can determine which policies, parties, and candidates get supported by American voters. Why do these racial divisions persist? Previous research on the racial divide has identified material interests, sympathy and resentment toward social groups, political principles and audience as sources of the racial divide (Kinder and Sanders 1996; Kinder and Winter 2001). But how do these factors get actualized? What are the causal mechanisms that link things like social group and self-interests to political evaluations? We attempt to address these questions in the current project by illustrating how emotions moderate the connection between race and politics.