UC Irvine

The recent rise in explicitly prejudicial campaign messaging, along with the complementary rise in rhetorical appeals to pro-minority sentiments, have not been fully explained by current scholarship. What factors have caused this transition in political messaging? What role do social norms play in determining the acceptability of these appeals? How can the effects of overtly prejudicial appeals be neutralized? This dissertation seeks to answer these questions by providing a comprehensive understanding of the use of appeals to pro- and anti-minority sentiments by elites and the reception of these messages by the public in contemporary U.S. politics. Section one details the factors that have transformed electoral incentives of the Democratic and Republican Parties to include explicit signaling of their stances on racial issues and provides evidence from survey experiments that, under certain conditions, using explicit appeals can be an effective electoral strategy. Section two provides a theoretical framework for the role social norms play in determining whether explicit appeals are accepted or rejected. Then, using an original measure of social norms adherence, findings from regression analyses show that norms of acceptable rhetoric vary by the group being targeted and the political party purveying the message. Finally, section three develops and tests strategies to neutralize the effects of overt prejudice on candidate and policy evaluations. These findings improve our understanding of racial appeals and specifies the central power of norms in conditioning evaluations of prejudice.