In the midst of this evolving political landscape on which new debates about welfare ensued, the news media played and continues to play a critical role in the public's understanding of what "welfare" ought to be. Utilizing a novel experimental design, I wanted to examine the impact of media portrayals of the "welfare queen" (Reagan's iconic representation of the African-American welfare experience) on white people's attitudes about welfare policy, race and gender.

It is hardly debatable that race and ethnicity play a critical role in American society and politics (Myrdal 1944; Dahl 1972). Even in the face of myriad civil rights laws at the state, local, and federal levels, racial and ethnic inequalities persist (Wilson 1987). This condition is compounded by the fact that America is undergoing significant changes in terms of its ethnic and racial composition (Glazer 1985; Kitano and Daniels 1988). Recent estimates suggest that non-Hispanic Whites will cease to be a numerical majority sometime in the early 21st century and that the state of California is at the forefront of this trend (Bouvier and Gardener 1986).

One of the more fundamental questions about the dynamics of ethnic diversity concerns its impact on American politics. Social scientists have tended to concentrate on the behavioral aspects between and among the various American racial and ethnic groups.Thus there is ample literature on Black political participation (Browning, Marshall and Tabb 1984; Danigelis 1978; 1982; Gilliam and Bobo 1988; Gutterbock and London 1983; Jackson 1987; London and Hearn 1977; Miller 1982; Olsen 1970; Shingles 1981; and Verba and Nie 1972). There has also been work done comparing the participation levels and styles of Blacks and Mexican-Americans (Antunes and Gaitz 1975; Lovrich and Marenin 1976). Moreover, in the last ten or so years some research has focused solely on Mexican-American participatory behavior (Buehler 1977; Flores 1986; MacManus and Cassel 1982; Welch 1977; Welch, Comer and Steinman 1975). Most recently, studies have begun to emerge which examine participatory behavior among Asian-Americans (Nakanishi 1986) and which analyze differential participation rates and styles among several racial and ethnic minorities (Uhlaner, Cain and Kiewiet 1987). The social science literature on race and ethnicity, however, has been conspicuously silent on the consequences of ethnic diversity for mass orientations towardpolitics.1

The central focus of this paper is on the extent to which racial and ethnic differences account for variations in mass political attitudes. In other words, are group differences manifest as differential policy preferences both between and within groups? To answer this question, I analyze attitudinal divergence among Whites, Blacks, Mexican-Americans, and several Asian-American groups in the state of California. I begin by reviewing three theoretical perspectives on cultural integration in the United States. After a brief discussion of data and methodological issues, I utilize multivariate regression models to test hypotheses generated by the literature.

Recently we set out to examine in a novel way the connections between what people see in local newscasts and what they think about juvenile crime. We designed an experiment to assess the impact of the "superpredator news frame" in which the only difference between what groups of viewers saw in a news story involved the race of the alleged youth perpetrator.

Strategic frame analysis, the method advanced in this paper, allows a nuanced understanding of the role played by media and public opinion in impeding or advancing the goals of those who seek more public attention and resources allocated to youth. Strategic frame analysis relies on a series of methods adapted from traditional opinion research, media studies and cultural and cognitive fieldwork including survey research, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, media content analysis, metaphor analysis, and media effects tests. This paper applies the basic principles of strategic frame analysis to discern what Americans think about youth (especially teenagers), why they think what they do, what consequences this has for youth policy and policy advocates, and how policy advocates might best engage Americans in a discussion about positive youth development.

Local television news is the public’s primary source of public affairs information. News stories about crime dominate local news programming because they maintain high audience demand. The prevalence of this type of reporting has led to a crime narrative or “script” that includes two core elements: crime is violent and perpetrators of crime are non-white males. We show that this script has become an ingrained heuristic for understanding crime and race. Using a multi-method design, we assess the impact of the crime script on the viewing public. Our central findings are that exposure to the racial element of the crime script increases support for punitive approaches to crime and heightens negative attitudes about African-Americans among white, but not black, viewers. In closing, we consider the implications of our results for intergroup relations, electoral politics, and the practice of journalism.

In this study, we integrate research findings on the impact of exposure to stereotype reinforcing local crime news with theories about the impact of residential context on attitudes about race and crime. To date, there has been no research investigating whether neighborhood context mitigates or exacerbates the impact of exposure to racially stereotypic crime news. We test extensions of two competing theories. According to the social contact hypothesis, under certain circumstances whites’ residential proximity to blacks might reduce the likelihood of further negative effects via exposure to racially stereotypic media messages. On the other hand, according to the group threat hypothesis, proximity to blacks might increase whites’ sensitivity to stereotype-reinforcing crime news. We collected information about the neighborhood racial context for each respondent in an experiment. We then exposed respondents either to racially stereotypic or non-stereotypic crime stories on local news programs. Results support our prediction based on the social contact hypothesis. When exposed to racial stereotypes in the news, white respondents living in white homogeneous neighborhoods endorsed more punitive policies to address crime, expressed more negative stereotypic evaluations of blacks, and felt more distant from blacks as a group. Whites from more mixed neighborhoods were either unaffected or moved in the opposite direction: endorsing less punitive crime policies, less negative stereotypes, and feeling closer to blacks as a group as a result of exposure to the stereotypic coverage. The implication of this moderating impact of residential integration is discussed.