Abstract
AbstractThis article explores the effect of explicitly racial and inflammatory speech by political elites on mass citizens in a societal context where equality norms are widespread and generally heeded yet a subset of citizens nonetheless possesses deeply ingrained racial prejudices. The authors argue that such speech should have an ‘emboldening effect’ among the prejudiced, particularly where it is not clearly and strongly condemned by other elite political actors. To test this argument, the study focuses on the case of the Trump campaign for president in the United States, and utilizes a survey experiment embedded within an online panel study. The results demonstrate that in the absence of prejudiced elite speech, prejudiced citizens constrain the expression of their prejudice. However, in the presence of prejudiced elite speech – particularly when it is tacitly condoned by other elites – the study finds that the prejudiced are emboldened to both express and act upon their prejudices.
Highlights
There has long been a tension in the United States over the right to freely express opinions and societal norms regarding what type of speech is acceptable in the public domain, especially concerning speech targeted at marginalized groups in society, such as racial and ethnic minorities
While a long literature in political science has examined the effect of racial rhetoric on policy preferences and candidate evaluations, we explore a novel dimension related to the norms of interpersonal conduct
The effect of Prejudice in the Trump Condemn condition is not statistically different from that observed in the control condition, indicating that when exposure to Trump and his racially inflammatory statements is coupled with condemning signals from political elites, the perceptions of high- and low-prejudice citizens differ little from those observed in a context devoid of Trump or his racially controversial speeches
Summary
There has long been a tension in the United States over the right to freely express opinions and societal norms regarding what type of speech is acceptable in the public domain, especially concerning speech targeted at marginalized groups in society, such as racial and ethnic minorities. Our experiment involves a 2 (Republican candidate: Bush/Trump) × 2 (Political issue: campaign finance reform/immigration) × 2 (Trump’s racially inflammatory speech: absent/present) × 3 (Elite signals: none/condone/condemn) imbalanced factorial design.
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