Michael Tesler

The Return of Old-Fashioned Racism to White Americans’ Partisan Preferences in the Early Obama Era

Old-fashioned racism (OFR) was unrelated to white Americans’ partisan preferences throughout the post-civil rights era. This study argues OFR could return to white partisanship following decades of dormancy because of Obama’s presidency. After first demonstrating that such attitudes were significantly stronger predictors of opposition to Obama than ideologically similar white Democrats, I support that spillover hypothesis with the following evidence: opposition to interracial dating was correlated with white partisanship in 2009 despite being unrelated to party identification in 12 earlier surveys; moreover, evaluations of Obama completely mediated that relationship between OFR and partisanship; old-fashioned racism predicted changes in white panelists’ partisanship between 2006 and 2011; these attitudes were also a stronger determinant of midterm vote preferences in 2010 than they were in 2006, with that relationship once again mediated by President Obama; and experimentally connecting Obama to congressional candidates significantly increased the relationship between OFR and 2010 preferences.

Elite Domination of Public Doubts About Climate Change (Not Evolution)

This article examines the sources of ideological skepticism about two issues where there is a scientific consensus: climate change and evolution. The results indicate that self-identified conservatives doubt global warming in large part because of elite rhetoric, but that evolution beliefs are unrelated to reception of political discourse. News reception is perhaps the strongest predictor of conservatives’ climate change skepticism, but has no influence on their aversion to evolution. Moreover, the article leverages three sources of variation in elite discourse on climate change—temporal, cross-national, and experimental—to show that changes in the prevalence of ideological cues strongly affect public opinion about global warming. Politically attentive conservatives, in fact, were more likely to believe scientists about global warming than liberals were in the 1990s before the media depicted climate change as a partisan issue. The United States is also the only nation where political interest significantly predicts both conservatives’ skepticism about, and liberals’ belief in, climate change. Finally, evidence from a national survey experiment suggests that Americans would be less skeptical of manmade global warming if more Republicans in Congress believed in it, but a growing Congressional consensus about evolution would not diminish doubts about its existence.

Race Appeal: How Candidates Invoke Race in U.S. Political Campaigns, by Charlton D. McIlwain and Stephen M. Caliendo

a “continuum of differentiation” (p. 20) between information and influence. But in actual campaigns, how real is the distinction between information and influence? Put another way, is there any “information campaign” that does not have at its heart the effort to influence, whether for private or asserted “public” benefit? And how many such campaigns do not in fact spawn opposition, overt or covert? This, however, is a mere nitpick. Strategy in Information and Influence Campaigns is an authoritative synthesis of what we know about campaign strategies, a fertile source of new hypotheses, an accessible guidebook for students, and an invaluable primer for policymakers and activists.