Emotion and Adaptation

Immigrant populations in many developed democracies have grown rapidly, and so too has an extensive literature on natives' attitudes toward immigration. This research has developed from two theoretical foundations, one grounded in political economy, the other in political psychology. These two literatures have developed largely in isolation from one another, yet the conclusions that emerge from each are strikingly similar. Consistently, immigration attitudes show little evidence of being strongly correlated with personal economic circumstances. Instead, research finds that immigration attitudes are shaped by sociotropic concerns about its cultural impacts—and to a lesser extent its economic impacts—on the nation as a whole. This pattern of results has held up as scholars have increasingly turned to experimental tests, and it holds for the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Still, more work is needed to strengthen the causal identification of sociotropic concerns and to isolate precisely how, when,...

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Public Attitudes Toward Immigration

In his seminal work \"The Clash of Civilizations\" and the \"Remaking of World Order,\" Samuel Huntington argued provocatively and presciently that with the end of the cold war, \"civilizations\" were replacing ideologies as the new fault lines in international politics.His astute analysis has proven correct. Now Professor Huntington turns his attention from international affairs to our domestic cultural rifts as he examines the impact other civilizations and their values are having on our own country.America was founded by British settlers who brought with them a distinct culture including the English language, Protestant values, individualism, religious commitment, and respect for law. The waves of immigrants that later came to the United States gradually accepted these values and assimilated into America's Anglo-Protestant culture. More recently, however, national identity has been eroded by the problems of assimilating massive numbers of primarily Hispanic immigrants, bilingualism, multiculturalism, the devaluation of citizenship, and the \"denationalization\" of American elites.September 11 brought a revival of American patriotism and a renewal of American identity. But already there are signs that this revival is fading, even though in the post-September 11 world, Americans face unprecedented challenges to our security.\"Who Are We?\" shows the need for us to reassert the core values that make us Americans. Nothing less than our national identity is at stake.Once again Samuel Huntington has written an important book that is certain to provoke a lively debate and to shape our national conversation about who we are.\\

Diasporas, Foreign Governments, and American Politics: An Excerpt from "Merging America with the World," in Who Are We? the Challenges to America's National Identity

MC 281 is the second in the required sophomore sequence for Social Relations and Policy. In this course, we will explore the interactions and experiences between and among various groups in American history. We will consider how Americans both defended and contested prevailing definitions of fitness for citizenship and inclusion in the political process and American life, and how groups sought to gain access to social and political equality. This course focuses on the history of relationships within and between different groups in the United States, and explores the complexities of those relations. Rarely centered solely on race or ethnicity, such interactions were also affected by gender, sexuality, religion, nation, and class. We will also explore the shifting definitions of race and ethnicity. Students will analyze not only the experiences of the different groups, but also the connections between them to assess the larger dynamics and their implications for public policy.

Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

Ethnocentrism: Theories of conflict, ethnic attitudes, and group behavior.

Amidst discontent over America's growing diversity, many white Americans now view the political world through the lens of a racial identity. Whiteness was once thought to be invisible because of whites' dominant position and ability to claim the mainstream, but today a large portion of whites actively identify with their racial group and support policies and candidates that they view as protecting whites' power and status. In White Identity Politics, Ashley Jardina offers a landmark analysis of emerging patterns of white identity and collective political behavior, drawing on sweeping data. Where past research on whites' racial attitudes emphasized out-group hostility, Jardina brings into focus the significance of in-group identity and favoritism. White Identity Politics shows that disaffected whites are not just found among the working class; they make up a broad proportion of the American public - with profound implications for political behavior and the future of racial conflict in America.

White Identity Politics

General ethnocentrism seems to be a powerful antecedent of immigration opinion, typically displaying larger effects than economic concerns. News about immigration, however, may focus attention on a particular group in a given historical moment. We predict group-specific affect, not general ethnocentrism, should most powerfully shape immigration policy opinion in the contemporary United States. We test this expectation with content analyses of news coverage, survey data from 1992 to 2008, a survey experiment, and official statistics. First, we find that mentions of Latinos in news coverage of immigration outpace mentions of other groups beginning in 1994, the year when Proposition 187, a proposal in California to end most social welfare and educational assistance to illegal immigrants, garnered significant national attention. Second, while ethnocentrism dominates economic concerns in explanations of Whites' immigration policy opinions, attitudes toward Latinos in particular account for nearly all of the impact of ethnocentrism since 1994. Finally, journalistic attention to Latino immigration roughly parallels actual rates of immigration from Latin America, suggesting the media shaping of policy opinion around this group may be driven by real-world demographic patterns.

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Immigration opposition among U.S. whites: General ethnocentrism or media priming of attitudes about latinos?

A growing body of work has examined the psychological underpinnings of conspiracy theory endorsement, arguing that the propensity to believe in conspiracy theories and political rumors is a function of underlying predispositions and motivated reasoning. We show, like others, that rumor endorsement can also be a function of individuals’ group attitudes. In particular, among white Americans, birther beliefs are uniquely associated with racial animus. We merge this finding with other work which shows that rumors are more strongly endorsed by the individuals most motivated and capable of integrating them among their pre-existing attitudes and beliefs. We find, therefore, that it is white Republicans who are both racially conservative and highly knowledgeable who possess the most skepticism about Obama's birthplace.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/8C13EDF7D45A475E97B5D2B35BC8979E/S2056608518000259a.pdf/div-class-title-the-genesis-of-the-birther-rumor-partisanship-racial-attitudes-and-political-knowledge-div.pdf

The Genesis of the Birther Rumor: Partisanship, Racial Attitudes, and Political Knowledge

Since the first half of the twentieth century, whites have become much more accepting of the principle of racial equality even as they have continued to endorse negative racial stereotypes about African-Americans. Some scholars argue that this ambivalence has been exploited by contemporary political elites who have learned to fashion subtle racial appeals that activate these latent attitudes without appearing to violate widely held norms of racial equality. This strategy has been dubbed racial priming. In this brief article, we summarize and evaluate the work in this area, with a particular emphasis on studies that employ experimental research designs.

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.polisci.12.060107.154208

Experiments on Racial Priming in Political Campaigns

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Ashley Jardina

Papers

White Identity Politics

Immigration opposition among U.S. whites: General ethnocentrism or media priming of attitudes about latinos?

The Genesis of the Birther Rumor: Partisanship, Racial Attitudes, and Political Knowledge

Experiments on Racial Priming in Political Campaigns

Demise of Dominance: Group Threat and the New Relevance of White Identity for American Politics.