The Effectiveness of a Racialized Counterstrategy

Antoine J. Banks and Heather M. Hicks

American Journal of Political Science, 2019, vol. 63, issue 2, 305-322

Abstract: Our article examines whether a politician charging a political candidate's implicit racial campaign appeal as racist is an effective political strategy. According to the racial priming theory, this racialized counterstrategy should deactivate racism, thereby decreasing racially conservative whites’ support for the candidate engaged in race baiting. We propose an alternative theory in which racial liberals, and not racially conservative whites, are persuaded by this strategy. To test our theory, we focused on the 2016 presidential election. We ran an experiment varying the politician (by party and race) calling an implicit racial appeal by Donald Trump racist. We find that charging Trump's campaign appeal as racist does not persuade racially conservative whites to decrease support for Trump. Rather, it causes racially liberal whites to evaluate Trump more unfavorably. Our results hold up when attentiveness, old‐fashioned racism, and partisanship are taken into account. We also reproduce our findings in two replication studies.

Date: 2019
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12410

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:amposc:v:63:y:2019:i:2:p:305-322

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Journal of Political Science from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().