Effects of the 2008 Obama Presidential Campaign on White Racial Prejudice

Research on the importance of race in the 2008 presidential campaign has focused almost exclusively on how white racial prejudice influenced vote choice. Instead, I test a theory about how mass public exposure to Obama influenced white racial prejudice. This is the first study to assess the impact of exposure to Obama on individual-level changes in prejudice using nationally representative panel data collected during the campaign. Throughout the campaign, innumerable images of Obama and his family contradicted negative racial stereotypes and changed the balance of black exemplars in mass media in a positive direction, thus causing reductions in prejudice among political television viewers. Exposure to Obama caused the largest reductions in prejudice among McCain supporters, Republicans, and conservatives. Although these individuals surely resisted Obama’s political message, consistent with previous research, racial exemplars influence judgments without deliberative processing, thus minimizing resistance to counter-stereotypical portrayals. Because conservatives have more negative preexisting images of blacks, exposure to Obama countered their expectations far more than those with more positive expectations. Moreover, consistent with the psychological basis for mediated intergroup contact, even exposure to conservative programs that criticized Obama’s politics reduced prejudice because these programs nonetheless portrayed him as countering negative racial stereotypes. Using three waves of panel data and fixed effects analyses of within-person change, I am able to make the strongest causal argument possible outside of experiments

Explaining White Opposition to Black Political Leadership: The Role of Fear of Racial Favoritism

Despite the election of America\u27s first Black president, most non‐Hispanic Whites continue to oppose Black political leadership. The conventional explanation for White opposition is sheer racial prejudice, yet the available empirical evidence for this theory is inconsistent. I test an alternative theory that Whites perceive Black political leaders as a threat to their group\u27s interests. Using a new survey measure and nationally representative panel data covering the 2008, 2010, and 2012 U.S. elections, I find that a majority of Whites perceive Black elected officials as likely to favor Blacks over Whites. Moreover, fear of racial favoritism predicts support for Barack Obama in both cross‐sectional models and fixed‐effects models of within‐person change, controlling for negative racial stereotypes. I replicate these findings using a separate cross‐sectional survey fielded after the 2014 election that controls for racial resentment. Collectively, these results suggest that perceptions of conflicting group interests—and not just prejudice—drive White opposition to Black political leadership

Fear of Gender Favoritism and Vote Choice during the 2008 Presidential Primaries

It has long been suggested that gender stereotyping undercuts support for female candidates, yet a growing number of studies—including several analyses of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign—find limited evidence of such effects. By contrast, I find consistent evidence of voter gender bias using an alternative approach based on perceptions of group favoritism. Using new survey measures included on a nationally representative panel survey fielded during the 2008 US presidential primaries, I find that many citizens perceive female elected officials as likely to steer government resources toward women, a behavior that most evaluate negatively. Moreover, fear of gender favoritism predicts opposition to Clinton throughout the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, as well as in a hypothetical general election matchup with the Republican nominee

Debating How to Measure Media Exposure in Surveys

To answer many of the most pressing questions in the social sciences, researchers need reliable and valid measures of media exposure that can be implemented in surveys. Despite considerable effort, however, substantial disagreement remains about how best to measure this key concept. This chapter critically reviews the debate surrounding traditional frequency measures of exposure to “news” and contemporary list-based measures of political media exposure. It also evaluates the related debate over how best to capture the effects of media exposure with different observational research designs. Overall, the chapter finds that although substantial progress has been made in measurement and research design, both issues require more attention if scholars are to understand the many and varied effects of media exposure

The Friendly Media Phenomenon: A Cross-National Analysis of Cross-Cutting Exposure

We hypothesize that in the real world, as opposed to the lab, the norm is for people to experience friendly media that favor their political predispositions when political favoritism is perceived at all. For this reason, media are generally limited in their ability to create cross-cutting exposure. We test this hypothesis using representative survey data drawn from 11 different countries with varying media systems. We further hypothesize that television will contribute more to cross-cutting exposure than newspapers. Finally, and most importantly, we test the hypothesis that the more the structure of a country’s media system parallels that of its political parties, the more that country’s population will be dominated by exposure to like-minded views via mass media. We find confirmation for all 3 of these hypotheses and discuss their implications for the role of mass media in providing exposure to cross-cutting political perspectives

Past Place, Present Prejudice: The Impact of Adolescent Racial Context on White Racial Attitudes

Extensive research on racial contexts suggests that white Americans living near black Americans adopt more negative racial attitudes. Theoretically, local intergroup exposure has been conceptualized as acting contemporaneously through various mechanisms. However, a separate body of research on political socialization indicates that adolescent experiences are often especially influential. We hypothesize that whites’ racial contexts during adolescence produce prejudiced responses. We then test this hypothesis using two complementary data sets, a population-based panel conducted 2007–13 and the Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Survey (1965–97). Our analyses demonstrate the enduring influence of adolescent contexts at larger levels of aggregation: while the racial composition of whites’ current counties is not a consistent predictor of racial prejudice, the racial composition of their county during high school is. Proximity during one’s formative years increases racial prejudice years later, providing new insights about local contextual effects and the roots of racial prejudice

Effects of Mass Media on Prejudice

The way outgroup members are portrayed in the media is widely believed to have consequences for levels of prejudice and stereotyping in the mass public. The visual nature of television and its heavy viewership make it a key source of information for impressions that ingroup members may have of other social groups. However, most research to date has focused on documenting the portrayals of various groups in television content, with only a few studies documenting the causal impact of television viewing. To further understanding of this hypothesis, we outline the contributions and limitations of past work, and point to the most promising theoretical frameworks for studying media influence on outgroup attitudes

All Virtue is Relative: A Response to Prior

In “The Challenge of Measuring Media Exposure: Reply to Dilliplane, Goldman, and Mutz,” Markus Prior suggests that scholars should avoid using a new method of measuring exposure to political television that we evaluated in a recent article published in the American Journal of Political Science. We respond to each of his criticisms, concluding that although no measurement approach is without its flaws, scholars should always use the best approach that is available at any given point in time

Active interoceptive inference and the emotional brain

We review a recent shift in conceptions of interoception and its relationship to hierarchical inference in the brain. The notion of interoceptive inference means that bodily states are regulated by autonomic reflexes that are enslaved by descending predictions from deep generative models of our internal and external milieu. This re-conceptualization illuminates several issues in cognitive and clinical neuroscience with implications for experiences of selfhood and emotion. We first contextualize interoception in terms of active (Bayesian) inference in the brain, highlighting its enactivist (embodied) aspects. We then consider the key role of uncertainty or precision and how this might translate into neuromodulation. We next examine the implications for understanding the functional anatomy of the emotional brain, surveying recent observations on agranular cortex. Finally, we turn to theoretical issues, namely, the role of interoception in shaping a sense of embodied self and feelings. We will draw links between physiological homoeostasis and allostasis, early cybernetic ideas of predictive control and hierarchical generative models in predictive processing. The explanatory scope of interoceptive inference ranges from explanations for autism and depression, through to consciousness. We offer a brief survey of these exciting developments

How white is the global elite? An analysis of race, gender and network structure

Research on elites often utilizes network analysis to describe and analyse the interrelationships among elites and how their prominence varies by demographic characteristics. We examine the diversity of global elites through an analysis of the board members of large corporations, think tanks, international organizations, and transnational policy planning groups. Using new data, we provide the first descriptive picture of global elite networks in terms of race and gender. We also test the ‘core– periphery’ hypothesis, which predicts that as non-whites and women achieve elite positions they will be marginalized to the periphery of elite networks, while the core remains significantly more white and male. We find consistent evidence for the core– periphery hypothesis across a range of empirical tests, from simple k-coring to various core–periphery models. Most groups decline in their representation in the core, and this includes white women. White men are the only group that increases in representation in the core compared to the periphery