Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T05:28:15.418Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Fear or Loathing: Affect, Political Economy, and Prejudice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2022

Stephen M. Utych Open the ORCID record for Stephen M. Utych [Opens in a new window] ,
Rachel Navarre Open the ORCID record for Rachel Navarre [Opens in a new window]  and
Matthew Rhodes-Purdy Open the ORCID record for Matthew Rhodes-Purdy [Opens in a new window]
Stephen M. Utych*
Affiliation:
Boise State University, 1910 W University Drive, Boise, ID 83725, USA
Rachel Navarre
Affiliation:
Bridgewater State University, 131 Summer Street, Bridgewater, MA 02325, USA
Matthew Rhodes-Purdy
Affiliation:
Clemson University, 232 Brackett Hall, Clemson, SC 29634, USA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: stephenutych@boisestate.edu
Get access

Abstract

Ethnonationalist politics have been on the rise in the United States since the 2008 financial crisis, culminating with the rise of Donald Trump. We examine why two seemingly unconnected things—economic crises and prejudice—so often arise simultaneously. Combining theories of economics and emotions, we connect economic crises and prejudice through the role of emotional response to crises, namely anger and anxiety. We use two survey experiments in the United States to test various theories of how emotions might connect economic threat to negative intergroup attitudes. We find that economic concerns increase both anger and anxiety among individuals, but that these emotions have distinct effects on prejudice. Angry individuals show increased prejudice, but only towards groups one is ideologically predisposed to be prejudiced towards. In contrast, anxiety exhibits few consistent effects on prejudice.

Keywords

Prejudiceemotionspartisanship
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , November 2022 , pp. 505 - 525
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abramowitz, AI and Webster, S (2016) The rise of negative partisanship and the nationalization of U.S. elections in the 21st century. Electoral Studies 41, 12–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Albertson, B and Gadarian, SK (2015) Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Altemeyer, R (1981) Right-Wing Authoritarianism. Manitoba: University of Manitoba Press.Google Scholar
Arceneaux, K (2017) Anxiety reduces empathy toward outgroup members but not ingroup members. Journal of Experimental Political Science 4, 68–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bandura, A and Walters, RH (1959) Adolescent Aggression. New York, NY: The Ronald Press.Google Scholar
Bermeo, N and Bartels, LM (2014) Mass Politics in Tough Times: Opinions, Votes, and Protest in the Great Recession. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Black, M (2004) The transformation of the southern democratic party. Journal of Politics 66, 1001–1017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brader, T (2006) Campaigning for Hearts and Minds: How Emotional Appeals in Political Ads Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Brader, T and Marcus, GE (2014) Emotion and political psychology. In Huddy L, Sears DO and Levy JS (eds.), Oxford handbook of political psychology (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Butz, DA and Yogeeswaran, K (2011) A new threat in the air: macroeconomic threat increases prejudice against Asian Americans. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47, 22–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buyuker, B, D’Urso, AJ, Filindra, A and Kaplan, NJ (2021) Race politics research and the American presidency: thinking about white attitudes, identities and vote choice in the Trump era and beyond. Journal of Race, Ethinicity, and Politics 6, 600–640.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Calvo, MG and Castillo, MD (2001) Selective interpretation in anxiety: Uncertainty for threatening events. Cognition and Emotion 15, 299–320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, A, Gurin, G and Miller, WE (1954) The Voter Decides. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson, and Co.Google Scholar
Christiani, L (2021) When are explicit racial appeals accepted? Examining the role of racial status threat. Political Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09688-9 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeSteno, D, Dasgupta, N, Bartlett, MY and Cajdric, A (2004) Prejudice from thin air: the effect of emotion on automatic intergroup attitudes. Psychological Science 15, 319–324.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Engelhardt, AM and Utych, SM (2020) Grand old (tailgate?) party: partisan discrimination in apolitical settings. Political Behavior 42, 769–789.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Esses, VM, Medianu, S and Lawson, AS (2013) Uncertainty, threat, and the role of the media in promoting dehumanization of immigrants and refugees. Journal of Social Issues 69, 518–536.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gadarian, SK and van der Vort, E (2018) The gag reflex: disgust rhetoric and gay rights in American politics. Political Behavior 40, 521–543.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilens, M (1999) Why Americans Hate Welfare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, JH, Lerner, JS and Tetlock, PE (1999) Rage and reason: the psychology of the intuitive prosecutor. European Journal of Social Psychology 29, 781–795.3.0.CO;2-3>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodwin, M (2019) Europe’s populists are here to stay. The Wall Street Journal 14 June: https://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-populists-are-here-to-stay-11560524237 Google Scholar
Hale, I (2020) The compound effects of candidate race and racial resentment in US House elections. Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics 5, 299–325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hodson, G, Hewstone, M and Swart, H (2013) Advances in intergroup contact: epliogue and future directions” In Hodson G and Hewstone M (Eds.) Advances in Intergroup Contact. New York: Psychology Press, pp. 262–305.Google Scholar
Huddy, L, Feldman, S, Taber, C and Lahav, G (2005) Threat, anxiety, and support of antiterrorism politics. American Journal of Political Science 49, 593–608.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huddy, L, Mason, L and Aaroe, L (2015) Expressive partisanship: campaign involvement, political emotion, and partisan identity. American Political Science Review 109, 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Imai, K, Keele, L and Tingley, D (2010) A general approach to causal mediation analysis. Psychological Methods 15, 309–334.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Inglehart, R and Norris, P (2017) Trump and the populist authoritarian parties: the silent revolution in reverse. Perspectives on Politics 15, 443–454.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Inglehart, R and Norris, P (2019) Cultural Backlash and the Rise of Populism: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Iyengar, S, Sood, G and Lelkes, Y (2012) Affect, not ideology: a social identity perspective on polarization. Public Opinion Quarterly 76, 405–431.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iyengar, S and Westwood, SJ (2015) Fear and loathing across party lines: new evidence on group polarization. American Journal of Political Science 59, 690–707.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobs, L, Boukes, M and Vliegenthart, R (2019) Combined forces: thinking and/or feeling? how news consumption affects anti-Muslim attitudes through perceptions and emotions about the economy. Political Studies 67, 326–347.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jost, JT (2019) Anger and authoritarianism mediate the effects of fear on support for the far right—what Vasilopoulos et al. (2019) really found.” Political Psychology.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kam, CD and Trussler, MJ (2017) At the nexus of observational and experimental research: theory, specification, and analysis of experiments with heterogeneous treatment effects. Political Behavior 39, 789–815.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kessler, T, Mummendey, A, Funke, F, Brown, R, Binder, J, Zagefka, H, Leyens, J-P, Demoulin, S and Maquil, A (2010) We all live in Germany but… Ingroup projection, group-based emotions and prejudice against immigrants. European Journal of Social Psychology 40, 985–997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kinder, D and Kam, C (2009) Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kmenta, J and Gilbert, RF (1968) Small sample properties of alternative estimators of seemingly unrelated regressions. Journal of the American Statistical Association 63, 1180–1200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koc, Y and Anderson, JR (2018) Social distance toward Syrian refugees: the role of intergroup anxiety in facilitating positive relations. Journal of Social Issues 74, 790–811.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krosch, AR and Amodio, DM (2014) Economic scarcity alters the perception of race. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, 9079–9084. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1404448111 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Krupnikov, Y and Piston, S (2016) The political consequences of Latino prejudice against Blacks. Public Opinion Quarterly 80, 480–509.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kunovich, RM (2013) Labor market competition and anti-immigrant sentiment: occupations as contexts. International Migration Review 47, 643–685.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lerner, JS and Keltner, D (2000) Beyond valence: toward a model of emotion-specific influences on judgment and choice. Cognition and Emotion 14, 473–493.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levendusky, M (2009) The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marcus, GE, Neuman, R and Mackuen, M (2000) Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Mason, L (2018) Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. Chicago: Chicago University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mason, L and Wronski, J (2018) One tribe to bind them all: How our social group attachments strengthen partisanship. Advances in Political Psychology 39, 257–277.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, SM and Davis, NT (2021) The effect of white social prejudice on support for American democracy. Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics 6, 334–351.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mills, C and D’Mello, S (2014) On the validity of the autobiographical emotional memory task for emotion induction. PLOS ONE 9, e95837.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Na, EK, Lee, GH and Kim, HS (2010) Everything is always President Roh’s fault? Emotional reactions to politics and economy as sources of presidential evaluations and the role of media use and interpersonal communication. Asian Journal of Communication 20, 124–138.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nassar, R (2020) Threat, prejudice, and white Americans’ attitudes toward immigration and Syrian refugee resettlement. Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics 5, 196–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelsen, K (2021) You seem like a great candidate, but…: race and gender attitudes and the 2020 democratic primary. Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics 6, 642–666.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rhodes-Purdy, M, Navarre, R and Utych, SM (2020a) Measuring simultaneous emotions: existing problems and a new way forward. Journal of Experimental Political Science 8, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1017/XPS.2019.35 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rhodes-Purdy, M, Navarre, R and Utych, SM (2020b) Populist psychology: economics, culture, and emotions, Journal of Politics forthcoming.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riek, BM, Mania, EW and Gaertner, SL (2006) Intergroup threat and outgroup attitudes: a meta-analytic review. Personality and Social Psychology Review 10, 336–353.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rolls, E (2005) Emotion Explained. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schram, SF and Fording, RC (2021) Racial liberalism resurgent: connecting multi-racial protests and electoral politics today. The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics 6, 97–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shafer, A (2021) Cultural backlash? How (not) to explain the rise of authoritarian populism. British Journal of Political Science 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123421000363 Google Scholar
Sherif, M (1977) Crisis in social psychology: some remarks toward breaking through the crisis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 3, 368–382.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sherif, M and Sherif, C (1964) Reference Groups. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Spanovic, M, Lickel, B, Denson, TF and Petrovic, N (2010) Fear and anger as predictors of motivation for intergroup aggression: evidence from Serbia and Republika Srpska. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 13, 725–739.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steele, RR, Rovenpor, DR, Lickel, B and Denson, TF (2019) Emotion regulation and prejudice reduction following acute terrorist events: the impact of reflection before and after the Boston Marathon bombings. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 22, 43–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stephan, WG and Mealy, MD (2011) Intergroup threat theory. In Christie DJ (Ed) The Encyclopedia of Peace Psychology. Malden: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sunstein, CR and Kahneman, D (2007) Indignation psychology, politics, law. Working paper. Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics. http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/263/.Google Scholar
Tesler, M (2016) Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Utych, SM (2018) How dehumanization influences attitudes toward immigrants. Political Research Quarterly 71, 440–452.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valentino, NA, Hutchings, VL, Banks, AJ and Davis, AK (2008) Is a worried citizen a good citizen? Emotions, political information seeking, and learning via the Internet. Political Psychology 29, 247–273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Zomeren, M, Fischer, AH and Spears, R (2007) Testing the limits of tolerance: how intergroup anxiety amplifies negative and offensive responses to out-group-initiated contact. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33, 1686–1699.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vasilopoulos, P, Marcus, GE and Foucault, M (2018) Emotional responses to the Charlie Hebdo attacks: addressing the authoritarianism puzzle. Political psychology 39, 557–575.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, C, Duck, JM and Newcombe, PA (2012) The impact of media reliance on the role of perceived threat in predicting tolerance of Muslim cultural practice. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 42, 3051–3082.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Utych et al. supplementary material

Appendix

Download Utych et al. supplementary material(File)
File 85.1 KB