1
Forecasts and Frames: Narratives about Rising Racial Diversity and the Political Attitudes
of U.S. Whites
Morris Levy
Department of Political Science
University of Southern California
Dowell Myers
Price School of Public Policy
University of Southern California
How do white Americans respond to news reports about demographic forecasts that project
increasing racial and ethnic diversity? Do their reactions vary depending upon whether reports
explicitly adopt the narrative of an impending white minority or speak of a persistent, though
transformed, white majority that includes a growing share Americans with mixed-race
backgrounds? We probe these questions using a national survey experiment that randomly
assigned non-Hispanic white Americans to read differently framed fictitious articles reporting on
Census Bureau projections of continued rises in ethno-racial diversity. In particular, we explore
how familiar to white Americans different narratives are, whether they evoke distinct emotional
reactions, and whether they influence opinions about public spending, immigration attitudes, and
assessments of the state of race relations in American society. We find that these frames resonate
emotionally in very different ways and have a significant but moderate impact on political
attitudes.
2
In March 2015, the Census Bureau projected that whites would become a minority of the
U.S. population in less than thirty years.1 The news reverberated through American media to
both ends of the political spectrum. Breitbart described a “nation as a whole barreling toward a
majority-minority future.”2 The Huffington Post produced a black-and-white spoof of a 1950s
instructional video entitled, “So You’re About to Become a Minority…” that purported to inform
whites about their future life inhabiting decaying inner cities, running afoul of police, and
confined to dead-end jobs.3
A small number of articles discussing the Bureau’s projections also offered a rival
account of America’s racial future, one rooted in the ongoing relevance of the “melting pot.” In
this narrative, whites would remain a large majority of the U.S. public as traditional racial
boundaries blurred, Asians and Hispanics intermarried with the majority, and an increasing
number of Americans of mixed racial heritage came to think of themselves as part of a
transformed American mainstream.4
In fact, the Census Bureau projections used to promote the finding of a dwindling white
majority were themselves accompanied by alternative formulations of racial identity. Given the
practice begun in the 2000 census of asking respondents to check all categories that apply, two
basic tabulations are made possible. An “inclusive” definition of each race counts all people who
say that are of a given race either alone or in combination with other race choices. Most often the
Census Bureau places emphasis on an “exclusive,” race alone definition, i.e. only counting
people who are “purely” of a given race. In the case of the white population, a further reduction
1 The report is available at http://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-tps16.html. 2 http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/25/census-more-minority-children-than-whites-more-whites-
dying-than-being-born/ 3 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/so-youre-about-to-become-a-minority_us_553011f0e4b04ebb92325daf 4 See, e.g., http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/07/06/its-official-the-us-is-becoming-a-minority-majority-
nation.
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in numbers is made by excluding people who also are also of Hispanic origin or heritage. The
smallest count of “whites,” and the most rapidly declining, is the group known as “non-Hispanic
white alone.”
The administrative choice to adopt this definition of whiteness for the purpose of making
projections reflects the usual mix ideological beliefs, political agendas, and scientific rationales
(see Hochschild and Powell 2008; Hochschild and Weaver 2010). Since the narratives about
demographic change that are produced for mass consumption presuppose characterizations of the
future that are rooted in this accounting decision, how the Bureau defines whiteness is also likely
to have political and ideological consequences.
This paper explores a particular set of political consequences flowing from alternative
definitions of whiteness and the competing ways of framing America’s racial future that they
inform. We ask whether these narratives are familiar to white Americans; whether they rankle,
reassure, or are taken in stride; and whether they produce distinct effects on opinions about
government spending on public goods and immigration policy and beliefs about race relations.
Would a public that still implicitly conflates whiteness with American identity (Devos & Banaji
2005) and harbors increasingly politicized racial resentments (Tesler and Sears 2010), feel
threatened by a narrative that highlights their own group’s decline relative to others over and
above a bare-bones narrative about rising ethnic diversity? Would the alternative story about the
future of whiteness in America assuage these concerns or potentially lead to even greater
consternation over the erosion of clear boundaries between whites and others?
We address these questions using a survey experiment that randomly assigned a national
sample of whites to a control or to read one of three fictitious news stories consisting of
information and frames culled from news coverage of the Census Bureau’s 2015 projections.
4
One story presented a bare discussion of continued rises in racial diversity, without any
references to majority status. A second foretold a persistent or continuing white majority under
an inclusive definition of whiteness that counts people from mixed backgrounds as white if they
so identify themselves. A third resembled the predominant media treatment and forecast a white
minority by 2044.
We then asked respondents whether they were familiar with the story they had seen and
gauged their emotional reaction to it. Interspersed into the rest of the survey were several
questions measuring political attitudes about taxation and spending on education, immigration,
and the state of race relations in the U.S., all of which the literature on racial diversity and public
opinion suggested to us might be influenced by exposure to the different frames of rising
diversity.
The findings suggest quite different levels of familiarity with and emotional reactions to
these different narratives. With respect to effects on political attitudes, the results are mixed.
We find clear evidence of modest-to-large effects on some attitudes often linked to racial
diversity and threat but not others and in some contexts but not others. But in almost every
instance, we found the narrative of a transformed, blurred, but persistent white majority
reassuring relative to the more frequently projected narrative of an impending white minority.
These findings suggest that much remains to be learned about how majority groups react to
different types of ostensible losses of status – the loss of numerical dominance versus the loss of
exclusivity or distinctiveness. On a practical level, they also inform demographers, government
agencies, and public media about the consequences of the communication strategies they employ
to disseminate information about demographic projections.
5
Framing Racial Projections and Public Opinion
A large and multi-disciplinary body of social science research speaks to the power of
ethnic and racial identities and attitudes to shape a wide range of social and political attitudes.5
One of this literature’s conclusions is that conditions of “threat” heighten intergroup animus and
can raise the salience of racial and ethnic identities and political choices (e.g. Key 1949; Blalock
1967; Alesina, Baqir, & Easterly 1999; Myers 2007; Hopkins 2009; Abrajano & Hajnal 2015).
When feeling their status threatened by another group, the dominant group is expected to take
steps to reassert its position. These might include adopting policies that are overtly hostile to the
subordinate group’s rights and interests, limiting redistribution and spending on programs that
benefit the subordinate group, and ramping up harsh and punitive means of social control in
areas such as criminal justice (Blalock 1967; Bobo & Hutchings 1996; Soss et al. 2011).
There is no general agreement about what conditions pose or appear to pose a racial
threat, and the concept has been operationalized in a variety of distinct ways. But most topical
research takes for granted that a dominant group will feel threatened if they see their economic,
social, and political supremacy challenged by a subordinate group. Contexts in which
subordinate group populations are large or rapidly rising are therefore ripe for threatened
reactions (Key 1949; Hopkins 2009). Rapidly rising racial and ethnic diversity may therefore
cause white Americans to imagine that their grip on society and politics slipping away. This
might sour their feelings toward the growing minority groups, lead them to support more
restrictive immigration policies to stem their increase, and promote opposition to redistribution
and investment in public goods and services. Moreover, if whites increasingly perceive a
5 Among the many examples are Kinder & Kam (2009); Sears et al. (2000); Putnam (2007); Alesina and Glaeser
(2004); Stichnoth & Van der Straeten (2009); Mendelberg (1997); Oliver & Wong (2001); Masuoka & Junn (2013);
Lind (2007); Vigdor (2001); Luttmer (2001); Hero (1998); Barreto (2007); Fox (2004).
6
generational divide between mostly white elderly Americans and mostly non-white younger
Americans, we might expect opposition in particular to programs such as education that make
investments in developing the skills and earnings potential of younger generations (cf. Poterba
1997).
However, objective local or national circumstances and trends may not always proxy well
for people’s perception, interpretation, and tendency to politicize demographic change.
Americans routinely overestimate the size of local and national minority group populations
(Alba, Rumbaut and Marotz 2005; Wong 2007; Sides, and Citrin n.d.). They subjectively define
their local communities and neighborhoods in quite different ways, influencing perceptions of
and reactions to context (Wong 2007). And they politicize and construe diversity differently
depending on whether elite discourse makes it salient and links it to social and political issues
(Nelson and Kinder 1996; Hopkins 2009).
News about racial projections would be expected, at a minimum, to raise the salience of
racial and ethnic change, priming whites to think of ostensibly non-racial policies through the
lens of racial identities and attitudes and raising the stakes of adopting policies that might slow or
halt these changes. Consequently, we hypothesized (H1) that reading a news story about the
Census Bureau’s projections that Latino and Asian populations in the U.S. would (a) increase
opposition to taxation and public spending on education, since whites might imagine non-white
beneficiaries of “their” tax contributions, especially as regards future generations that would be
even more ethnically diverse (b) increase opposition to immigration, since slowing immigration
would presumably stem the tide of demographic change, and (c) engender less sympathy for
these groups and more for whites.
7
Intergroup threat theory suggests ingroup members will perceive greater threats from the
presence of outgroups when the intergroup context is structured in a way that seems to
jeopardize their own group’s status and well-being. One of the major determinants of this threat
is the perceived size of outgroup relative to ingroup (Stephan & Renfro 2002). According to
intergroup emotions theory, the particular negative affective reactions individuals have to
changes in intergroup contexts depend on their interpretation of the way their own group’s status
is affected: perceptions that their own group is becoming more vulnerable produce fear while
perceived zero-sum competition fosters anger (Smith 1993). We therefore hypothesized that
highlighting the implication of an impending white minority would increase self-reported anxiety
in response to exposure to the impending white minority narrative over and above the less
pointed narrative about rising diversity (H2a). Researchers have found evidence that this white
minority narrative does increase anxiety about their own group’s status (Craig & Richeson
2014a; Outten et al. 2012; Danbold & Huo 2015). However, these studies did not directly test
whether framing rising diversity as leading to a white minority was critical to generating these
reactions or whether information about rising diversity was itself sufficient to generate anxiety.
This increased sense of threat, we expected (H2b), would exacerbate each of the effects
on whites’ attitudes predicted in H1. Prior research has found that exposing whites to
information about their own group’s future minority status does increase negative affect toward
outgroups (Craig & Richeson 2014a; Outten et al. 2012) and to more conservative policy
preferences on public spending and, somewhat surprisingly, shifts toward more conservative and
Republican self-identification among voters who were initially independent (Craig & Richeson
2014b). However, existing research does not definitely test whether the “active ingredient” in
these narratives is in fact the white minority framing or simply a report about rising diversity.
8
Existing research has also focused squarely on the white minority framing of racial
projections without yet exploring how alternative portrayals of these same trends might heighten
or assuage these attitudinal effects. Craig & Richeson (2014a, p. 10), for example, acknowledge
that “this type of White versus minority framing (i.e., ‘majority-minority’) is likely to increase
the degree to which white Americans perceive the changing demographics as threatening” and
call for future research that “examine[s] how the framing of these racial demographic changes
affects whites’ racial attitudes.”
Our research responds to this call by explicitly testing whether an alternative framing,
inherently no less valid on social scientific or technical grounds, would produce different sets of
reactions. As a third hypothesis, we expect that framing the rise in diversity as a modern
manifestation of America’s history of ethnic blending and blurring that would preserve a white
majority, albeit one transformed through racial mixing, blending, and multiracial identification,
might assuage and counteract some of the threatened feelings that result from receiving news
about large-scale increases in diversity (H3a). We therefore also expect (H3b) that it would
counteract the effects on attitudes about public spending on education, immigration, and race
relations that we expect from a bare narrative about rising diversity (H1) and from a narrative
that plays up whites’ imminent loss of numerical dominance (H2b).
These hypotheses, H3a and H3b, strike us as far from assured. They depend on the
assumption that whites are willingness to accept a more nuanced racial future and view the
blurring of traditional racial boundaries positively.6 In other words, taken together, H2 and H3
6 Outten et al. (2012) find that a “bogus” (p. 18) account of Vancouver’s future as majority white despite rising
diversity assuages the reactions of white residents relative to an account that portends their minority status. There
was no control condition in which respondents were exposed to rising diversity without either of these narratives.
This demonstration serves Outten et al.’s argument well that minority status is worrisome to whites and leads to a
variety of intergroup attitude shifts. Our purpose is instead to examine whether a narrative that is no less objectively
true and still reports on racial trends can generate distinct reactions from the prevailing narrative.
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imply that whites will bristle at a frame that suggests they will be overtaken by other groups
numerically but not by a frame that suggests they will lose their group’s distinctiveness and
exclusivity from these groups.
Much depends on whether whites view the rise of racial mixing and multiracial
identification as a threat to their own group status or a positive development. On the one hand,
there is some evidence that whites do have warm feelings toward multiracial individuals
(Campbell & Herman 2010). A majority of Americans, including whites who scored high on a
standard measure of racial resentment (Sears & Henry 2003), felt that President Obama should
have identified himself as both black and white on his 2010 Census form (Citrin, Levy, & Van
Houweling 2014) even though whites also instinctively tend to classify people of mixed black
and white background as black (Ho et al. 2011; Krosch et al. 2013). On the other hand, these
explicit normative statements may conflict with longstanding and deep-seated discomfort about
the increasing fluidity of racial identity (Hochschild, Weaver, & Burch 2012), in which case the
transformed white majority narrative might also be perceived as threatening.
Research Design
To test these expectations, we embedded a survey experiment into a national Internet
survey of white non-Hispanic Americans fielded by Survey Sampling International (for
descriptive statistics, see Appendix A). Since the interpretability of our experiment depended on
respondents’ attention to the survey, we included a question gauging attentiveness after asking
questions about political interest and respondents’ feelings about their own financial condition
and the condition of the country, all before administering the treatments (for wording of this
question, see Appendix B). The attention question weeded out 45% of the initial sample,
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yielding a final N of approximately 2,600 who participated in the experiment and all of whom
completed the full questionnaire.
The experimental protocol proceeded as follows: One fourth of the respondents in our
survey read a story about conservation that was unrelated to racial projections (control). One
fourth read a story reporting on projections of continued increases in U.S. racial diversity, led by
rapid growth among Hispanics and Asians (diversity). This story also noted that diversity would
rise most among the young while older Americans remained more heavily white. The remaining
respondents read versions of this diversity story augmented with one of two narratives about
what this would mean for the persistence of a white majority in America. Half of them read that
whites would be a large white majority for the foreseeable future under a more inclusive
definition of whiteness that counts the growing number of Americans with mixed racial ancestry
who identify as white and another group (blending). The other half read an article modeled on
the predominant media framing of the Census Bureau’s 2015 forecasts (minority). This story
cited rising white mortality and declining fertility as factors leading to a majority-minority nation
by 2044. The full text of each story is provided in Appendix B. All respondents were then asked
whether they had heard of the story before; whether it made them feel anxious, angry, hopeful, or
enthusiastic; and, as a gauge of whether the stories had been understood, a question asking
respondents to identify the main “takeaway.”
After a series of questions about the regulation of self-driving cars, ordinances limiting
construction noise, and the desirability of generous paid family leave policies – intended to
buffer the treatments from the measurement of the outcomes – questions measuring our
dependent variables were included at various junctures in the survey. To gauge how the stories
influenced opinions about taxation and public spending, we posed respondents a choice of
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whether to support or oppose a hypothetical bill that would raise property taxes 10% in order to
increase funding for public schools. One fifth of respondents were randomly selected to be
asked this question with no additional frames. Others were exposed to competing positive and
negative frames, intended to serve as treatments in a separate experimental study. The negative
frame, which emphasized government waste and the failure of prior education spending to
improve the quality of schools, was held constant. Respondents were given either a
“sociotropic” rationale for supporting the tax increase (benefits the state in a rapidly changing
economy to have skilled workers), an “enlightened self-interest” rationale (investing in young
people’s skills will help ensure a secure retirement for aging Americans), and a racial equity
rationale (with diversity growing among the young, it is critical to promote racial equality by
investing in education). Responses were measured on a five-point scale, where a “one”
represented strong support of the bill to raise taxes to fund education and a “five” represented
strong opposition.
We also solicited opinions about immigration and race relations in between the two sets
of questions about public spending. We asked whether the number of immigrants allowed to live
in the U.S. should be increased, decreased, or kept about the same and whether immigrants
overall are a benefit or burden to U.S. society. We then asked respondents to assess the state of
race relations between whites and blacks, Latinos, and Asians (racres_black, racres_hisp, and
racres_asian, all measured on five-point scales from very good to very bad) and to opine
whether racism against all four of these groups was widespread in American society
(racism_white, racism_black, racism_hisp, racism_asian, measured dichotomously as “yes,
widespread” or “no, not widespread” and coded so that 1 = not widespread). The wording for all
questions analyzed is provided in Appendix B.
12
The survey also included the American National Election Study measures of partisan
identification and liberal-conservative ideology and asked a range of standard demographic
questions, including age, gender, income, education, and state of residence. Respondent race
was not asked because all of the survey respondents had been selected on the basis of their self-
identification as white and not of Hispanic origin.
Results
On balance, respondents reported a high degree of unfamiliarity with most of the news
stories. Unsurprisingly, only 11% said they had heard of the control story about conservation,
but only 23% said they had heard the story about rising levels of diversity. The blend story about
increasing mixed-race background and identification was familiar only to 14% of respondents.
By far the most familiar narrative was the white minority story, known to 40% of
respondents. This figure is on fact almost twice as high as the reported degree of familiarity with
the bare diversity story that it fully contains: many more whites find forecasts of rising diversity
more familiar when they also reference the additional narrative about their group’s imminent
minority status. This suggests that many white people have contextualized rising diversity as a
component of their own group’s relative numerical decline.
Lack of familiarity did not prevent respondents from absorbing the main point of the
articles. Overall, 83% correctly selected the main point of the article from a menu of five
options, though the error rate was noticeably higher for the more complex and unfamiliar blend
story (24%) than the others.
Emotions But familiarity does not mean that whites have emotionally gotten used to this
account of America’s racial future. As the top panel of Table 1 shows, consistent with H2a, the
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impending white minority narrative greatly increases self-reported anxiety while dampening
hopefulness, both by approximately 17 percentage points over the bare diversity rising narrative.
The blending narrative appears somewhat reassuring, compared to the diversity narrative, raising
those who report feeling hopeful by about six percentage points. Clearly, the blending narrative
elicits much less threatened reactions.7
Social desirability might be an issue in interpreting these particular distinctions, since we
asked respondents directly how they felt about these stories. However, it is striking that such a
high percentage of whites are comfortable reporting feelings of anxiety in response to the
dominant and most familiar media framing of future rises in ethnic diversity. One would think
that the generally positive treatment of diversity in mainstream elite discourse (Schuck 2003)
would lead those motivated by social desirability pressures to keep their negative reactions to the
white minority story to themselves, yet a large proportion of whites do not. Almost half of white
Republicans have no qualms about expressing negative reactions to the diversity narrative alone.
If they are uninhibited in expressing negative feelings about diversity per se it is not clear why
they would be reluctant to express such feelings about a more inclusive redefinition of whiteness.
Thus we do not think social desirability offers a satisfactory account of the way that our
treatments influenced emotional response.
Intuitively, we would have expected younger and more educated cohorts to be more
aware and accepting of emerging norms that accept multiracial identification, and we might have
expected receptivity to these norms to be greater among Democrats than Republicans since
Democrats hold more liberal attitudes about a wide range of racial issues. To test for
7 Comparisons to the pure control are not straightforwardly interpretable since it is unclear whether the difference in
self-reported emotions between the control and bare diversity rising narrative is attributable to a positive response to
the former or a negative response to the latter.
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heterogeneous effects, we estimated a multinomial logistic regression model in which the
dependent variable was the four-level measure of feelings and the independent variables were the
indicators of treatment status, each interacted with party identification, age, and education.8
Contrary to our intuition, there were no statistically significant differences by age and education
in the effect of the blending and minority treatments, relative to the diversity story, and while
both Democrats and Republicans were strongly influenced by the framing of the forecast,
Republicans were much more affected. Since simple tabulation of the treatment effects by party
more simply illustrates the same pattern that emerges in the multinomial logit estimates, we
show the moderating effect of partisanship on the effects of the news stories in the bottom two
panels of Table 2. The diversity story induces almost twice as much anxiety among Republicans
as among Democrats. But the blending treatment seems to ease Republicans’ negativity to the
point that they exhibit similar emotional responses to this story as Democrats. Republican and
Democratic identifiers also exhibit similar rises in anxiety in response to the minority treatment,
leaving a little under half of Democrats and three-quarters of Republicans anxious or angry.
8 Alternative constructions of the dependent variable yielded similar results. In particular, using a dichotomous
version that scored anxiety and anger as negative emotions (0) and hopefulness and enthusiasm as positive (1)
changed nothing substantial.
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Table 1: Emotional Reactions to News Stories
Control Diversity Blending Minority
Full Sample
Anxious 6% 31% 27% 47%
Angry 2 8 7 12
Hopeful 81 50 56 33
Enthusiastic 11 12 10 8
N 706 632 655 639
Democrats
Anxious 5% 19% 26% 37%
Angry 3 6 9 9
Hopeful 83 59 53 43
Enthusiastic 9 16 12 11
N 299 244 302 291
Republicans
Anxious 5% 38% 24% 59%
Angry 2 10 5 15
Hopeful 82 43 63 21
Enthusiastic 11 9 8 5
N 287 282 237 248
Effects on Political Attitudes We expected that the framing of the demographic forecast
would influence its impact on political attitudes associated with racial threat as well as emotions.
This expectation is corroborated in most cases, though the effects are generally modest.
We begin by considering whether there are effects of these narratives on support for
spending on education. As shown in Figure 1, the diversity narrative does not itself significantly
alter support for a hypothetical bill that would increase property taxes 10% to increase school
funding (contra H1). But support for the bill varies significantly in response to the two different
elaborations on rising diversity. In the unframed condition, the persistent white majority
treatment increases support for the bill by .25 points on a 1-5 scale, while the white minority
treatment decreases support by .32. The former effect falls short of conventional levels of
16
statistical significance relative to the control (p=.16), but the latter is marginally significant
(p=.07), and the difference between the two effects is highly significant (p<.01), representing a
shift of nearly 40% of a standard deviation on the five point scale of support for the bill (.57).
When the additional frames are provided in the question, these effects become more muted,
though the blending treatment still marginally significantly increases support for the bill over the
bare diversity story (p=.07). One way to interpret these results is that the additional frames either
displaced or, in the case of the racial equity frame, obviated some of the effect of the
demographic forecast. There were no significant differences in the magnitude of the effects
across the three frames (not shown). Taking all of the framing conditions together, support for
the bill is significantly higher (p<.05) in the blending condition than in the diversity and white
minority condition. Overall, whites assigned to the blending narrative were about a seventh of a
standard deviation more supportive of the bill than were those assigned to the white minority
condition.
17
Figure 2: Effects of Treatments on Opposition to Bill with and without Frames
Note: Opposition is measured on a 5-point scale, where 5 indicates greatest opposition to a 10%
increase in property taxes to fund education.
Turning to immigration, there is no evidence that the rising diversity or white minority
treatments increased opposition to immigration relative to the control. However, the blending
treatment does appear to have modestly boosted support for immigration. This treatment
increased support for raising rather than lowering the level of immigration by .04 on a 0-1 scale,
or approximately one-seventh of a standard deviation (p<.05). This treatment also raised by four
percentage points the share of respondents who agreed that immigration is a net benefit rather
than a net burden, but this effect fell short of statistical significance (p=.11). It is possible that
the issue of immigration already evokes concerns about rising diversity and a sense of threat
about white minority status, in which case exposure to the diversity and minority narratives
might not add considerations to the process of opinion formation that are not already present
when whites consider immigration policy questions. That the blending narrative may modestly
Control
Diversity
Blending
Minority
2.5 3 3.5
No Frames
Control
Diversity
Blending
Minority
2.5 3 3.5
With Frames
18
offset opposition to immigration, at least in the short run, is impressive given the rootedness of
immigration attitudes in deep-seated attachments to the nation and conceptions of nationhood.
Few studies to date have found that hostility to immigration can be mollified by providing
general information about immigrants’ propensity to contribute economically and assimilate
(Wright and Citrin n.d.) or by correcting misperceptions about the actual levels of legal and
illegal immigration (Hopkins et al. n.d.).9
We also hypothesized that the white minority narrative would heighten perceptions of
conflict between whites and America’s other large racial and ethnic groups while the blend
narrative might mollify them by making rises in racial diversity strike whites in less starkly zero-
sum terms and by mitigating the perceived threat to group status. Contrary to this expectation,
we found no evidence that any of the treatments materially altered perceived relations between
whites and blacks, Latinos, or Asians. However, the stories exerted a considerable effect on
perceptions of the extent of racism against Hispanics and Asians without altering perceived
racism against whites or blacks. Figure 3 summarizes these effects by showing the mean level of
perceived racism (0= racism against the group is not widespread, .5 = not sure, 1 = racism
against the group is widespread) in each treatment condition. The baseline level of perceived
discrimination against the four groups varies quite a bit, from an overwhelming rejection of
widespread racism against Asians, to a high level of perceived racism against blacks. The blend
treatment increases mean perceived racism against Hispanics by .06 (p<.05) over the control and
against Asians by .05 (p<.01).
9 By contrast, there is considerable evidence that whites respond to information about individual immigrants’ human
capital and integration (Levy and Wright n.d.) as well as to stipulations about the parameters of particular policies
that communicate which sorts of immigrants would be affected and why (Levy et al. 2016).
19
Figure 3: Average Perceived Racism against Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, and Asians
Further inspection of the results does not support our conjecture that young, more
educated, and less conservative whites to be more receptive to the emerging norms of racial
fluidity and mixing that drive the blending narrative, but our results do not support this
expectation. To test this, we estimated a separate OLS regression model for each of the policy
attitude dependent variables in which the treatment indicator variables were interacted with age,
education, and party identification. None of the interaction terms in any of the models was
significant at p<.05 (results available from the authors).
Mediation We also examined whether emotions mediated the impact of the treatments on
these political attitudes. Our study is not equipped to test this rigorously, as we lack measures of
other potential mediators, such as the perceived consequences of racial change, which may also
Control
Diversity
Blending
Minority
.55 .6 .65 .7
Perceived Racism Against Blacks
Control
Diversity
Blending
Minority
.3 .35 .4 .45
Perceived Racism Against Whites
Control
Diversity
Blending
Minority
.4 .45 .5 .55
Perceived Racism Against Hispanics
Control
Diversity
Blending
Minority
.15 .2 .25 .3
Perceived Racism Against Asians
20
have been influenced by the treatments and are likely to be correlated with self-reported
emotional responses to them (cf. Imai et al. 2013). However, a simple univariate test (Baron and
Kenney 1986) that treats the item measuring emotions as an ordered variable ranging from angry
(most negative) to enthusiastic (most positive) is consistent with the idea that emotions mediated
the effect of replacing the conventional white minority narrative with the blending narrative.10
The results imply that approximately 19% of the effect on support for the education spending bill
is mediated by emotional response, 19% of the effect on perceived racism against Hispanics,
15% of the effect on perceived racism against Asians, and 47% of the effect on the preferred
level of immigration. In all cases, the estimated indirect effects were statistically significant at
p<.05. More research considering a larger set of plausible mediating variables would be needed
to reach definitive conclusions about the extent to which emotional responses to the treatments
mediate the effects of distinct narratives about the country’s racial future on political attitudes.
Discussion and Conclusion
This study has considered how white Americans perceive the ongoing racial and ethnic
change around them and whether these perceptions have consequences for their attitudes about
race, immigration, and public spending. The dominant narrative, most recognized by our
respondents, foretells imminent white minority status. This narrative, we find, stimulates
considerably more anxiety than a bare description of ongoing rises in ethnic diversity. The
results we have presented also suggest that the more threatening white minority narrative, and
possibly the less elaborated story about rising diversity, dampen support for public spending, at
least in some instances. More research is needed to examine precisely why these effects
manifest themselves in some cases but not in others. We have speculated that the availability of
10 These tests used the sem command in Stata 12.
21
alternate frames or considerations related to particular desirable spending items sometimes
counteracts or obviates the impact of the racial projection stories.
Contextualizing increases in diversity as part of a process of racial blending and blurring
that will leave a transformed white majority intact, however, assuages many of these concerns.
The more soothing story about a persistent, though transformed and more racially mixed, white
majority also counteracts some negativity toward taxation and spending that the white minority
story engenders. Moreover, this narrative appears to increase sympathy for the minority groups
most frequently discussed in debates over immigration in the U.S. It modestly boosts support for
immigration and also increases the number of whites who agree that there is a substantial amount
of racism against Asians and Hispanics. The other treatments do not appear to influence these
opinions, perhaps because conceptions of rising diversity and the decline of a white majority in
the U.S. are automatically evoked by questions about immigration and racism, blunting the
incremental effect of the stories.
Taken together, these results are consistent with the potential for rising diversity to
generate a sense of threat among whites that translates into real impacts on political attitudes.
They also provide another datum in the emerging body of research that examines how white
Americans and others feel about a future in which racial boundaries are less rigid than they once
were, and in which people of mixed-race backgrounds and who identify both as members of the
majority white group and other racial groups are more common.
The results also leave important questions for future research. One puzzling result is the
absence of differences in these effects by age and education, variables that typically indicate
greater racial tolerance and that we might have been expected to be correlated with respondents’
exposure and receptivity to new norms of multiracial identification. One possible reason for the
22
absence of moderation effects is that the blending narrative departs from the white minority
narrative in more than one way: it highlights multiracialism and a more diverse white population
than the standard narrative, but it also emphasizes the persistence of a white majority. The
description of a future characterized by mixed-race marriage and multiracial identification may
have appealed especially to younger and more educated respondents while the persistence of the
white majority in any form may have been especially reassuring to older and less educated
respondents who might have been more preoccupied about the idea of lost group status. Because
the blending treatment is a composite of these two narrative components, we can only speculate
here. Subsequent studies might fruitfully design treatments that would be capable of
disentangling these two components and test whether they resonate differently among young and
old and more and less educated segments of the white public.
Another natural next step would be to examine how non-whites react to the sorts of
accounts we have presented. The color line has long been a more formidable barrier to the
equality of blacks than to immigrant groups, who have faced discrimination have often gradually
come to be seen as white (e.g. Lee and Bean 2010; Ignatiev 1995). Black Americans might
therefore respond more favorably than whites to the dominant narrative of an imminent white
minority and view the blending narrative with skepticism because it has not historically
characterized the experience of their group the way it has the experience of many immigrant
groups.
These unresolved questions do not diminish the potential practical significance of these
results. We have shown that a single news story’s depiction of the dramatic rises in ethnic
diversity ongoing in America can have massive effects on emotional reactions and measurable
effects on policy attitudes. This highlights the importance of framing as a determinant of the
23
political effects of demographic change. And it takes a first step toward assessing the
consequences of different strategies for communicating demographic forecasts to the public.
While demographers learn technical skills of projections, virtually no literature exists on the
alternative narratives by which population projections of total growth, changing racial shares,
and aging should be shared with the public who are the subject of study. Long-range plans
require long-range data, and surely trustworthy data about 40-year cumulative demographic
changes could lead to vitally needed intergenerational public investment decisions. Yet, as we
have shown, different characterizations of the same projections could well lead to distorted
perceptions of relative sizes and rates of change (Alba et al. 2005), causing or averting defensive
reactions against perceived threat instead of promoting sound planning.
24
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29
Appendix A: Sample Descriptive Statistics
% Mean Median
Female 54
Age
<30 24
31-60 58
61+ 19
Education
% College Degree 49
Party ID 0.48 0.5
Dem 44
Rep 42
Ideology 0.51 0.5
Lib 32
Con 34
30
Appendix B: Wording of Treatments and Dependent Variables
I. Text of Fictitious News Stories
Diversity
U.S. Census Bureau Expects a More Racially Diverse America
By SAMUEL K. RICHARDSON
August 14, 2016
Washington, D.C. – Detailed new projections from the U.S. Census Bureau find that the U.S.
population will become more racially diverse in coming decades.
The largest increase in racial diversity will be seen among younger generations while older
Americans remain predominantly non-Hispanic white. Altogether, between 2016 and 2045, the
country’s Hispanic and Asian populations will rise 74% and 82% respectively, accounting for most
of U.S. population growth during that period.
According to Dr. Robert Manning, a sociologist at the University of Kansas’ Center for the Study of
Demography, “these projections represent the continuation of a decades-long trend. Racial and
ethnic diversity are increasing not only in large cities but also in suburbs and even rural areas as well.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Blending
U.S. Census Bureau Expects Enduring White Majority in a More Racially
Diverse America
By SAMUEL K. RICHARDSON
August 14, 2016
Washington, D.C. – Detailed new projections from the U.S. Census Bureau find that whites –
including people who consider themselves to be both white and another race or ethnicity – will
remain the large majority of a more racially diverse U.S. population for the foreseeable future.
31
The largest increase in racial diversity will be seen among younger generations while older
Americans remain predominantly non-Hispanic white. Altogether, between 2016 and 2045, the
country’s Hispanic and Asian populations will rise 74% and 82% respectively, accounting for most
of U.S. population growth during that period.
Over the same period, there will also be a major rise in the number of Americans with mixed-race
ancestry that includes a white parent or grandparent. Many such people identify themselves as white,
often in combination with another race or ethnicity. As a result, white Americans will continue to
make up about three-quarters (74%) of the U.S. population through 2060, the last year for which
projections are available.
According to Dr. Robert Manning, a sociologist at the University of Kansas’ Center for the Study of
Demography, “As has been the case throughout American history, we see Americans from diverse
and mixed backgrounds gradually coming to see themselves as part of the majority. America’s status
as a majority-white country is likely to persist long into the future.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Minority
U.S. Census Bureau Sees Whites Falling to Minority in a More Racially Diverse
America
By SAMUEL K. RICHARDSON
August 14, 2016
Washington, D.C. – Detailed new projections from the U.S. Census Bureau find the nation’s
demographics on a clear trajectory: whites are on target to become a minority in a more racially
diverse U.S. population in less than thirty years.
The largest increase in racial diversity will be seen among younger generations while older
Americans remain predominantly non-Hispanic white. Altogether, between 2016 and 2045, the
32
country’s Hispanic and Asian populations will rise 74% and 82% respectively, accounting for most
of U.S. population growth during that period.
Over the same period, the older white population will stop growing altogether. Already, for the first
time, whites are in the minority among children under the age of 5 and will be a minority of all young
people under the age of 18 before the end of the decade. By 2044, whites will be a minority of the
entire population.
According to Dr. Robert Manning, a sociologist at the University of Kansas’ Center for the Study of
Demography, “This is without historical precedent. Whites are becoming a minority in the U.S. as a
whole, and the former minorities are going to be the new majority, as they are in some parts of the
country already.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Control
Panda Population Increases Nearly 17%
By SAMUEL K. RICHARDSON
August 14, 2016
Washington, D.C. – The number of wild giant pandas has increased nearly 17% over the last decade,
according to a new survey conducted by the Wildlife Conservation Foundation.
Figures released today show that the global population of wild giant pandas has reached 1,864 – up
from 1,596 when their numbers were last surveyed in 2003.
A symbol of wildlife conservation, giant pandas are only found in China's Sichuan, Shaanxi and
Gansu provinces.
“The rise in the population of wild giant pandas is a victory for conservation and definitely one to
celebrate,” said Jeanette O’Malley, Senior Vice President of Wildlife Conservation.
According to the Fourth Giant Panda Survey, 1246 wild giant pandas live within nature reserves,
33
accounting for 66.8% of the total wild population size and 53.8% of the total habitat area. There are
currently 67 panda nature reserves in China, an increase of 27 since the last survey.
II. Dependent Variables
1. Now we'd like your opinion about a bill that was recently introduced in your state legislature. The
bill would raise property taxes by an average of 10% in order to raise money to improve the state's
public schools.
[Randomly varied positive frames: {None / Supporters of this bill say that, with the state's senior
population growing faster than its young population, investing in training a productive and skilled
future workforce is critical to supporting older residents in their hard-earned retirement / Supporters
of this bill say that, with the economy changing rapidly, investing in training a productive and skilled
future workforce is critical to the state's future economic success / Supporters of this bill say that,
with minorities making up a larger share of children and young adults, investing in training a
productive and skilled future workforce is critical to lowering racial inequality.} Note: those who
received no positive frame also received no negative frame. All of those who received a positive
frame were also give the following negative frame: Opponents of this bill say that taxes are too high
already and that instead of giving more money to public schools that are performing poorly, we
should reform the education system.]
What do you think? Would you support this bill or do you oppose it? (Strongly Support, Somewhat
Support, Neither Support nor Oppose, Somewhat Oppose, Strongly Oppose)
2. Do you think the number of immigrants from foreign countries who are permitted to come to
the U.S. to live should be...(increased a lot, increased a little, left about the same as it is now,
decreased a little, decreased a lot)
3. Please indicate which comes closest to your view, even if neither is exactly right:
-Immigrants today are a benefit to the U.S. because they contribute through their hard work
and job skills
-Immigrants today are a burden to the U.S. because they use public services and cost
taxpayers money
4. Thinking about race relations in this country...Would you say relations between whites and
each of the following groups are good or bad?
Very good
(1) Somewhat
good (2) Neither good nor bad (3)
Somewhat bad (4)
Very bad (5) Not Sure (6)
Blacks (1)
Hispanics
(2)
Asians (3)