This morning NPR's Morning Edition reported on a study which asked How Do Racial Attitudes Affect Opinions About The Health Care Overhaul? Steve Inskeep talked with Shankar Vedantam about a recently published paper by Michael Tesler. The transcript of the discussion is here.
INSKEEP: And we should acknowledge at the beginning we're going into dangerous territory here. People are very emotional about health care. Of course, race can be a very emotionally charged issue as well. And now we're going to mix them all together here.
VEDANTAM: That's right. So let me give you a little bit of background. So social scientists have known for a long time that when you ask people their views on policy questions, they are influenced by the identities that they share or don't share with political leaders. So if you're president shares your religion or your gender or race, you're much more likely to find the president's policies something that you can support. If you don't share the identity of your president, then you're much more likely to find yourself in opposition to the president.
INSKEEP: Which is understandable. People may say I don't understand all the details here, but I identify with this guy or this woman. And if they don't identify with the guy, it's going to be a different situation.
VEDANTAM: Right. And this is especially true for policies that have something to do with race. So for example, it isn't surprising that our attitudes about race would say something about our policy views on affirmative action. But the interesting question is, does the same thing happen in policy domains that have nothing to do with race?
More below the Orange Omnilepticon.
The NPR discussion is a good one as far as it goes. (Transcript here; audio and related story here.) Whatever your current opinion of NPR, they deserve some credit for at least trying to talk about race in politics; most of the media won't because the elephant in the room is.... well the elephant in the room. And the elephant tramples anyone who dares even breathe the race word - unless you want to talk about how oppressed the elephant is.
But enough of that. The study by Michael Tesler is an important effort to unravel what shapes political attitudes at both the conscious and unconscious (or unacknowledged) levels. The entire paper The Spillover of Racialization into Health Care: How President Obama Polarized Public Opinion by Racial Attitudes and Race is available here as a pdf file. Methodology is explained, numbers are given, references are listed.
The Question
It's well accepted that political issues dealing directly with racial issues like affirmative action, and aid to minorities become subject to racialization - racial attitudes directly affect political attitudes. This study was intended to see if healthcare reform is also subject to racialization since it is so closely tied to the President. From the paper:
"...the role of racial prejudice in mass opposition to President Obama's health care reform proposals was regularly debated during the summer and fall of 2009. Liberal political commentators often asserted in those months that at least some of the uproar sparked by Obama's policies was a product of race-based opposition to a black president's legislative agenda (e.g., Hannania 2009; Krugman 2009; Robinson 2009). This belief gained some public traction too. A Pew Survey from November 2009 revealed that 54% of adults thought that race was at least a minor reason why “people oppose Barack Obama's policies,” with 52% of African Americans saying it was a major factor (Pew Research Center 2010). The president, along with many other political figures, reached a much different conclusion, though. Obama repeatedly rebutted claims that hostility toward his health care plan was rooted in racial animus. He suggested instead that the media was merely pursuing this prejudiced opposition narrative because race continues to evoke such powerful emotions in American society.1 The racism debate continued up until the Affordable Care Act's passage in March 2010 with neither side providing much evidence in support of their contrasting positions about racial attitudes and mass health care opinions.2"
Tesler's study attempts to find that evidence; Tesler developed a method to isolate race as a factor in attitudes about healthcare reform with a survey strategy and panel interviews.
Again from the paper:
The observational data, however, cannot tell us whether the racialization of health care opinions was caused by Obama's association with the policy or by another factor like his partisanship. So with that in mind, we randomly assigned our November 2009 CCAP respondents to receive three different cues about who proposed specific health care reform policies.8 The three survey groups are described as (1) the neutral condition, (2) the Clinton-framed condition, and (3) the Obama-framed condition. Respondents in all three conditions were asked whether they favored or opposed the federal government guaranteeing health care for all Americans (i.e., universal coverage) and if they supported or opposed a government-administered health insurance plan to compete with private insurance companies (aka “the public option”)....
The Short Version of the Results
In short, the people being surveyed were given the same material - but it was presented three different ways: neutral, as coming from Bill Clinton's reform effort, or as from Barack Obama's reform proposals. The results are informative - and a bit depressing. To summarize quite a bit:
• Blacks were much more supportive of the proposals when pitched as coming from Obama rather than from Clinton - and the divergence between white and black attitudes on this became more pronounced.
• Whites who were liberal on racial issues were more supportive of the same policy proposals when they were supposedly coming from Obama than from Clinton.
• Whites who were not liberal on racial issues were less supportive of the same ideas if they thought they were coming from Obama rather than Clinton.
(And the neutral questions provided a baseline for comparison for each group.)
Remember the Stimulus?
It's not just healthcare reform; Tesler cites an additional study looking at racial attitudes and opinions about the stimulus package.
An additional three-condition experiment from our November 2009 CCAP reinterviews—one of whose groups framed the $787 billion stimulus package as legislation passed in 2009 by congressional Democrats—produced an even more dramatic pattern of deracialization. With President Obama's stimulus package receiving heavy media coverage during the first half of that year (Project for Excellence in Journalism 2009), the left panel of Figure 3 predictably shows that racial resentment was a powerful independent determinant of support for the policy among respondents who received the Obama-framed and neutral versions of this stimulus question. Those substantial resentment effects, however, almost completely vanished in the second panel of the display for the subset of respondents who were asked if they thought the economic stimulus package approved by congressional Democrats was a good or bad idea. In fact, racial resentment had a significantly larger negative impact on stimulus support in both the Obama and neutral conditions than it had among the Cong-Dem-group respondents (see Table A4). Shifting the responsibility for the stimulus away from President Obama toward these less racialized Democrats (Tesler and Sears 2010, Figure 8.2), therefore, appears to decrease the influence of racial attitudes on public support for this policy.
Points To Ponder
So much for the 2008 hope that America was now 'post-racial' - did anyone ever believe it? As I understand the implications of Tesler's findings, Barack Obama is a racially polarizing figure simply by existing. The more closely he personally is seen as being connected with an issue, the greater the amount of racialization that will affect attitudes about that issue. So what does this mean going forward?
It's quite clear that the President attempts to keep a low profile to minimize his polarizing effect on politics - but this may actually be counterproductive. Conventional wisdom would have him avoid conflict; yet it's no secret that the dishonorable opposition continually uses language and imagery to racialize every political issue wherever they can. This has energized their base.
What Tesler's research suggests is that a more pro-active President Obama could have a comparable effect on his base, among both blacks and whites with liberal views on race. Polarization is already taking place, but it's one-sided. Trying to take a centrist non-polarizing stance is simply not going to work.
This paper was released last month. Considering its conclusions, it's surprising it hasn't generated more interest to date. I expect the right wing to denounce it as elitist academic nonsense any day - assuming they don't try to ignore it to death first. The NPR story is getting some social media traffic. Think it'll go viral?
November 2012 is going to see the Right attempt to polarize the country along racial divides even more blatantly than in the past. The language being used on the campaign trail, the distortions and outright lies, the lout-rageous behavior of the talk-radio porn stars... well it would be nice if the forces of righteousness could show some comparable fire in their bellies. We're going to need it.
Wed Mar 21, 2012 at 3:46 AM PT: UPDATE: Takeaway point from all this: this study does a lot to explain why Republicans oppose everything from Obama by reflex and why they're so vehement about it - even when Obama is pushing ideas borrowed FROM Republicans. They can't help themselves.