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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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


N 299 244 302 291

Republicans

Anxious 5% 38% 24% 59%

Angry 2 10 5 15

Hopeful 82 43 63 21


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

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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.

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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

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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).

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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

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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


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





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.


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


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.



32



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.


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%


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)

34

5. Do you think racism against each of the following groups is widespread in the U.S.?

Yes, widespread (1) No, not widespread (2) Not sure (3)

Whites (1)

Blacks (2)

Hispanics (3)

Asians (4)

forecasts and frames: narratives about rising racial ... · assessments of the state of race...

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