RAPID: Racial Attitudes and Health Care Opinions

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

The growing organization of partisan politics by racial attitudes suggested by these results could have important policy ramifications. Race is probably the most visceral issue in American public life. As such, increased polarization of the electorate along the lines of racial attitudes would likely make the contemporary political discourse even more vitriolic than the already rancorous atmospheres under Presidents Clinton and Bush. Such a racialized environment would potentially make it more difficult to achieve common ground on public policy in the Age of Obama. That is a major reason why the last decade has witnessed a proliferation of research demonstrating that implicit racial communications can make racial attitudes more important in subsequent decision making (see Mendelberg 2008 for a review). Multiple studies, in fact, show that mass communications can make racial attitudes a more central ingredient of opinions about ostensibly non-racial policies such as welfare, crime and Social Security (Gilens 1999; Mendelberg 2001; Hurwitz and Peffley 1997; Winter 2008), as well as evaluations of presidential candidates in all-white contests (Mendelberg 2001; Valentino, Hutchings and White 2002). Research from the 2008 campaign significantly builds upon this existing knowledge by showing that merely situating a person or policy in opposition or accordance with Barack Obama made racial attitudes a much more important ingredient of public evaluations of these objects than they were beforehand (Tesler and Sears, forthcoming). This research project attempts to provide further evidence for this Obama-induced racialization by pinpointing the extent that health care opinions are influenced by racial attitudes and determining Obama?s causal role in racializing public opinion about a policy that has no manifest racial content.