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Political Behavior

Erschienen in:

01.09.2014 | Original Paper

The Public’s Anger: White Racial Attitudes and Opinions Toward Health Care Reform

verfasst von: Antoine J. Banks

Erschienen in: Political Behavior | Ausgabe 3/2014

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Abstract

Pundits and politicians debated whether race was implicated in the rancorous public forums and demonstrations over health care reform. Research suggests that for many white Americans, racial predispositions play a greater role in their opinions on health care than non-racial predispositions. Building on this work, I examine the extent to which anger uniquely activates white racial attitudes and increases their effect on preferences for health care reform. My theory suggests this effect occurs because anger and thoughts about race are tightly linked in memory. Using a nationally representative experiment over two waves, I induced several emotions to elicit anger, fear, enthusiasm, or relaxation. The results show that anger uniquely pushes racial conservatives to be more opposing of health care reform while it triggers more support among racial liberals. On the other hand, anger does not enhance the effect of race-neutral principles on health care reform.

Vorheriger Artikel Blame, Responsibility, and the Tea Party in the 2010 Midterm Elections

Nächster Artikel GOTJ: Get Out the Juror

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In fact, Price et al. (2006) find that people dissatisfied with the nation’s health care system feel more strongly about health care policy.

The whole sample was more likely to react with dissatisfaction (48 %) as opposed to anger (19 %). Of those that reacted with anger, they were most angry about “the government not representing the people” and “health care reform.”

This accusation came from an interview on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/ns/nightly_news#32867107.

When analyzed independently, other studies on emotion have shown that anger and fear have distinct effects on risk assessments (Lerner and Keltner 2001; Huddy et al. 2007) and information seeking (Valentino et al. 2008; MacKuen et al. 2010).

What differentiates appraisal theory from the AI model in terms of anger is the issue of blame. The AI model is silent on the issue of blame, perhaps, because the aversion dimension includes other negative emotions like disgust and contempt. Besides the disposition system, Marcus et al. (2000) also propose the surveillance system. Under this system, anxiety stems from novel threats and prompts greater attention and cognitive engagement.

Participants in the Knowledge Network panel are recruited by telephone through random digit dialing. Respondents that do not have access to the Internet are provided access through Web TV, free of charge. The response rate for wave 1 was 71 and 78 % for wave 2.

Several subjects were dropped from the analysis because they failed to follow proper instructions. The results are similar substantively and statistically if these respondents are included.

I use weights since my goal is to estimate the effect of the manipulation for the entire population under study. Knowledge Networks (KN) provides post-stratification weights, which are derived from distributions for gender, age, race, education, Census Region, metropolitan area, and Internet access. The distributions are adjusted based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. More information about KN procedures can be obtained from their website (www.knowledgenetworks.com).

This design has a potential drawback of its own related to biased mortality between the first and second waves. If some racially conservative respondents are turned off by the measures of racial attitudes in the pre-test, they might have been more likely to opt out of the second wave. Fortunately, the mortality rate was equivalent across the two waves—no biases occurred between waves 1 and 2 on variables such as symbolic racism (chi-squared =11.21, p=.796) and partisanship (chi-squared=1.23, p =.541).

Facial expressions have been shown to trigger the same emotion in the viewer (Ekman 1993). The facial expressions are in the “Appendix”.

For the relaxed condition, there was no image. Paul Ekman’s archival of emotional expression did not include an image of someone who was relaxed. The prompt for the relaxed condition stated “Now we would like you to describe in general things that make you feel RELAXED. It is okay if you don't remember all the details, just be specific about what exactly it is that makes you RELAXED and what it feels like to be RELAXED. Please describe the events that make you feel the MOST RELAXED, these experiences could have occurred in the past or will happen in the future. If you can, write your description so that someone reading it might even feel RELAXED.”

The reliability of the coders was high: Cronbach’s alpha for anger = .90, fear = .93 and enthusiasm = .91. The output across conditions in the emotion induction task was nearly identical, as subjects in the anger condition wrote an average of 30 words in comparison to 33 words for the fear condition, 28 words for the enthusiasm condition, and 27 words for the relaxed condition.

Because my hypothesis is concerned with the effect of anger relative to no emotional state, I use the relaxed condition as the baseline group.

When I take out the control variables the direction and magnitude of the coefficients are essentially the same. Furthermore, when I control for partisanship, my key effects still hold up across the different models. The variables are described in the “Measurement Appendix”.

I calculate the predicted probabilities by manipulating the emotion variables while holding all the other independent variables at their own values observed in the data and then averaging over all of the cases. (See Hanmer and Kalkan 2013 for a more detailed description of this approach).

A similar shift (86-points) occurs for respondents in the fear condition.

To determine if these differences were statistically significant, I ran a direct test of the differences in the estimated probabilities of those scoring high in symbolic racism for the anger and control conditions. The test shows that the effect of the anger group is statistically different from the control group for whites at the very high end of the symbolic racism scale. The difference between the two groups is .09 with a confidence interval between .002 and .178. Since the confidence interval does not overlap with zero, I can conclude that the effect is statistically significant at the 90 % confidence interval.

Similar to the difference test for those high in symbolic racism, I find that the effect of the anger condition is statistically different from the control condition (−.12) among those low in symbolic racism. This effect has a confidence interval between −.246 and −.024. Since this effect doesn’t overlap with zero, it is statistically significant at the 90 % confidence interval.

However, it is important to note that the interactive effect between the fear condition and ideology comes close to be statistically significant (p value = .127).

These results are available from the author upon request.

In this study, the correlation between symbolic racism and ideology is .40 (p ≤ .001)

The difference between the anger condition and the control condition for those at the very high end of the symbolic racism scale is significant at the 87 % confidence interval.

The difference between the anger condition and the fear condition for those high in symbolic racism is significant at the 90 % confidence interval.

I also found no significant effects when looking at race-neutral ideological principles.

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Titel: The Public’s Anger: White Racial Attitudes and Opinions Toward Health Care Reform
verfasst von: Antoine J. Banks
Publikationsdatum: 01.09.2014
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Political Behavior / Ausgabe 3/2014
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-013-9251-3

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