Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: The Impact of Alternative Elite Discourse on the Formation of Public Opinion: A Study of the Racial Divide in American Opinion

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

One of the more interesting empirical regularities within the study of American public opinion has been the enormous disagreement between black Americans and white Americans on issues of public policy. From affirmative action, to AFDC, to the United States intervention in the Arab/Israeli conflict, blacks and whites appear to disagree with each other on the direction that government should take on a whole host of policy issues. While previous research has suggested why blacks and whites should differ in their opinions on race specific issues, we have yet to explain why blacks and whites differ in their opinions on ostensibly non-racial issues, such as social security or health care. In this Doctoral Dissertation Research project the student explores more closely the nature of the black and white disagreement on non-race specific policy issues. Moving beyond other scholars focus on relationships between political predispositions and black and white differences in opinion on non-race specific issues the student develops a theoretical framework that considers the effects that exposure to differing elite discourses has on widening the gap in black and white public opinion. The student shows that an attempt to advance their own interests, ideas, and ideologies among their respective racial constituencies, African-American elites (including black elected officials, reporters, religious and organizational leaders, etc) and mainstream elites (those elites who are able to dominate mainstream discourse) frame non-race specific political issues in substantively different ways. Given this difference, I will then show how African Americans exposure to their own indigenous elite discourse and white Americans. lack of exposure to this alternative discourse plays an important role in contributing to the differences researchers have observed in black and white opinion on non-race specific issues. To do this the student has formulated a research design that analyzes not only the content of black and mainstream elite discourse on non-race specific issues but which also, thorough a series of framing experiments, experimentally test the differential effects that the messages supplied by these distinct discursive communities have on African American and white opinion with regard to these issues. He begins with a content analysis where he examines the different ways in which both Black and mainstream media have framed three important non-race specific political issues: social security reform, the Arab/ Israeli conflict and 1993 Clinton health care reform act. Examining the content of national black media sources (national black news magazines and several black newspapers) and national mainstream media sources (national news magazines and mainstream newspapers) at various points over the last decade and a half, the student identifies differences in the way these issues have been framed by these respective media sources. Next to get an idea about how the black and mainstream media's framing of these issues might influence black and white public opinion, I designed a set of experiments that allow me sort out the differential effects of black and mainstream elite issue frames on black and white public opinion of non-racial issues. These experiments allow testing of whether the alternative framing of non-racial issues within the black community leads to different interpretations of non-racial issues and as a result may help explain differences in black and white Americans opinions on these issues.