Tatishe M. Nteta

United We Stand? African Americans, Self-Interest, and Immigration Reform

Alongside the growth of the immigrant population has been a corresponding backlash by citizens who increasingly support restrictive immigration policies aimed at undocumented immigrants. Much of what we know about this backlash is based on data from White Americans. Are African Americans among the growing segment of anti-immigrant supporters? Employing data from the 2006 Pew Center “America’s Immigration Quandary Survey,” I uncover that African Americans support restrictive immigration policies, and that class membership alongside subjective and objective measures of self-interest influence these policy stances. These findings challenge prior assertions that self-interest does little to account for American public opinion, demonstrating that on the issue of immigration reform that self-interest matters for African Americans.

Rendering the implicit explicit: political advertisements, partisan cues, race, and white public opinion in the 2012 presidential election

In The Race Card (2001), Tali Mendelberg claims that once the racial content of an implicit racial appeal has been exposed the appeal loses its ability to mobilize voters. In this paper, we investigate this claim by employing a survey experiment embedded in Amazons Mechanical Turk in which respondents view Mitt Romneys “Right Choice” television ad on welfare and then read a short op-ed. The op-ed, written by a fictitious member of Congress whose partisanship was systematically varied, argues that the Romney ad (1) is racist or (2) has no racial undertones. In line with Mendelbergs predictions, we find that – regardless of the partisanship of the elite in question – exposure to an op-ed that denounces the Romney welfare advertisement as racist leads white Democrats and Republicans to more strongly perceive the advertisement as racist and express greater opposition to Romneys campaign. Our findings contribute to the literatures on racial priming and partisan motivated reasoning, and also make a strong case for further evaluating the influence of political leadership on racial attitudes.

Substance and Symbolism: Race, Ethnicity, and Campaign Appeals in the United States

Using data from the 2002 Wisconsin Advertising Project and a Democratic direct mailing firm, we ask if candidates publicly court African American and Hispanic voters through the inclusion of these groups in their campaign advertisements or through appeals to their substantive policy interests. We find evidence that Democratic and Republican candidates make symbolic and substantive appeals only when these appeals are very unlikely to be viewed by White voters. These findings lend credence to studies that conclude that candidates are hesitant to publicly court minority voters due to concerns that such activities may harm their existing electoral coalitions, particularly their standing with White voters.

Self-selection Versus Socialization Revisited: Military Service, Racial Resentment, and Generational Membership

Scholarship on racial attitudes has found that white veterans of World War II and the Korean War had more positive views of blacks than white civilians. However, more recent studies have argued that white veterans who have served in an all-volunteer force (AVF) now express more virulent views of blacks. Using data from the 2010–2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we explore whether military service continues to predict positive racial attitudes. We find that white veterans express more negative views of blacks relative to white civilians and that white veterans in the AVF generation exhibit the most negative views of blacks. Taken together, we believe that our results suggest a reassessment of the role of contemporary military experiences in liberalizing white racial attitudes and offer support for the self-selection perspective.

Race, partisanship, and perceptions of inter-minority commonality

ABSTRACT Feelings of commonality are central to the formation of multiracial political coalitions. Despite a fairly voluminous literature on where these feelings come from, however, relatively little is known about how elite messages influence individual-level perceptions of intergroup relations. This oversight is surprising given that so-called “elite opinion” theory has become “virtually orthodoxy” within political science. In order to explore the potential for opinion leadership on perceptions of commonality, this paper employs a survey experiment embedded in the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Testing hypotheses derived from elite opinion theory, this paper finds that no one interpretation of elite opinion theory can fully account for perceptions of commonality across racial groups. Scholars of race and ethnic politics would do well in the future, therefore, to acknowledge the complex ways that racial and partisan characteristics condition an individual’s response to elite messages.

Prejudice or Principled Conservatism? Racial Resentment and White Opinion toward Paying College Athletes:

Despite its widespread use in studies of race and ethnic politics, there exists a long-standing debate about whether racial resentment primarily measures antiblack prejudice or ideological conservatism. In this paper, we attempt to resolve this debate by examining racial resentment’s role in shaping white opinion on a “racialized” policy issue that involves no federal action and no government redistribution of resources: “pay for play” in college athletics. Using cross-sectional and experimental data from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, we find evidence not only that racial resentment items tap racial predispositions but also that whites rely on these predispositions when forming and expressing their views on paying college athletes. More specifically, we demonstrate that racially resentful whites who were subtly primed to think about African Americans are more likely to express opposition to paying college athletes when compared with similarly resentful whites who were primed to think about whites. Because free-market conservatism, resistance to changes in the status quo, opposition to expanding federal power, and reluctance to endorse government redistributive policies cannot possibly explain these results, we conclude that racial resentment is a valid measure of antiblack prejudice.