Playing the Race Card in the Post-Willie Horton Era: The Impact of Racialized Code Words on Support for Punitive Crime Policy

Playing the Race Card in the Post-Willie Horton Era: The Impact of Racialized Code Words on Support for Punitive Crime Policy Jon Hurwitz Mark Peffley

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Playing the Race Card in the Post-Willie Horton Era: The Impact of Racialized Code Words on Support for Punitive Crime Policy 2005 Public Opinion Quarterly 10.1093/poq/nfi004 hurwitz-peffley2005-racial-priming hurwitz-peffley2005-racial-priming.txt, the project's staged copy 493e7f23ef238e4917209331a6205e3a0b51f871 personal-copy political-science

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0 spans located by searching the stored text for the quote's exact words, allowing any whitespace between them mechanism Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. racial code-word framing of crime policy opinion Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. behavioural-experiment behavioural-experiment Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The authors do not claim their frame is the subtlest possible racial cue; many respondents openly equate the inner city with black Americans. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The design tests policy preferences only; extension to candidate preferences is asserted but untested. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The analysis is restricted to white respondents; the African-American subsample was dropped for lack of variance on the outcome. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. the experiment administered at random to half of the white sample, 290 respondents eliminates: self-selection into the experimental condition, and any difference between the people who saw the framing manipulation and those who did not · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. issue framing issue framing Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. racial stereotypes racial stereotypes Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. code words code words Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. racial attitudes racial attitudes Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. THE EFFECT IS NOT A SHIFT IN THE ANSWER - IT IS A CHANGE IN WHAT PREDICTS IT. `whites' racial attitudes (for example, racial stereotypes) were much more important in shaping preferences for punitive policies when they receive the racially coded, `inner city` question.` The outcome here is a REGRESSION COEFFICIENT, not a mean or a latency: the same people, the same policy question, and a different thing driving their answer depending on two words. A corpus that stores `prime -> outcome, direction: increases` cannot express this at all - the direction is not up or down, it is `your prior attitudes now matter more to what you say` Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. THE SMALLEST PRIME IN THIS CORPUS, AND THE AUTHORS SAY SO DELIBERATELY: `Quotation withheld (like `welfare queens`).` Two words inserted into one survey item. Every other prime in this corpus is a word list, an image, a scent, a room, a sentence structure or a period of noise; this is a modifier. And the minimalism is the argument - the paper's point is that after the Willie Horton ad made blatant appeals costly, what remains available is this small Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. THE CAUSAL CLAIM IS EXACT BECAUSE THE DESIGN IS THAT SIMPLE: `Quotation withheld.` The inference chain is stated in full and each link is separable - the two words differ, therefore the difference is theirs, therefore the group was brought to mind, therefore the policy was judged by the group. `It seems clear` marks where the demonstration ends and the interpretation begins Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. IMPLICIT BEATS EXPLICIT, AND THAT IS AN EMPIRICAL CLAIM ABOUT PERSUASION RATHER THAN ABOUT COGNITION: a blatant message `would, today, be either unproductive or counterproductive because, as a number of studies suggest, implicit appeals are much more effective.` Most of this corpus treats implicitness as a methodological device for isolating automatic processing. Here it is a STRATEGIC property with a history: the Willie Horton ad made the explicit version expensive, so the implicit one is what survives Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. builds-on → Nelson and Kinder (1996), group-centric issue framing Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. extends → Mendelberg (2001), implicit/explicit racial appeals and the Willie Horton ad Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. builds-on → Druckman (2001), limits of elite framing Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. issue framing —causes→ racial attitudes issue framing racial attitudes strength of the relation: 0.9 · note: NO effect direction, AND THIS IS THE CLEAREST CASE YET FOR WHY THAT AXIS DOES NOT FIT EVERY EDGE. The code word does not increase or reduce racial attitudes - it increases how much they PREDICT the policy answer. The vocabulary has no term for 'raises the weight of', and 'increases' would be read as 'makes people more prejudiced', which is not what was measured and would be a serious misreading of a paper about race. Weight 0.9: the design supports the causal claim, and the quantity it acts on needs the note. Audit 2026-09-28: DOUBTFUL - read against its full span and kept, but racial attitudes mattered more under racially coded frames; causes from 'issue framing' is loose. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. racial attitudes shaped punitive-policy preferences much more when the coded 'inner city' cue was present Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. a single coded phrase ('inner city') can carry strong racial connotations Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. the authors situate the effect within the issue-framing literature Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. support for punitive crime policy support for punitive crime policy Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution.

The full text of this article is not redistributable, so it is not included here. The evidence sentences are withheld with it; the tag layer and its grounding status remain. The article itself is at https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfi004.