Playing the Race Card in the Post-Willie Horton Era: The Impact of Racialized Code Words on Support for Punitive Crime Policy

Abstract

To date, little is known about the precise impact of racially coded words and phrases. Instead, most of what we know about racialized messages comes from studies that focus on pictorial racial cues (for exam- ple, the infamous Willie Horton ad) or on messages with an extensive textual narrative that is laced with implicit racial cues. Because in a post- Horton era strategic use of racially coded words will often be far more subtle than those explored in past studies, we investigate the power of a single phrase believed by many to carry strong racial connotations: city. We do so by embedding an experiment in a national survey of whites, where a random half of respondents was asked whether they support spending money for prisons (versus antipoverty programs) to lock up violent criminals, while the ot her half was asked about violent inner city criminals. Consistent with the literature on issue framing, we find that whites' racial attitudes (for ex ample, racial stereotypes) were much more important in shaping preferences for punitive policies when they receive the racially coded, ci ty question. Our results demonstrate how easy it is to continue playing the race card in the post-Willie Hor- ton era, as well as some of the l imits of such framing effects among whites with more positive racial attitudes.