-
4. Threat Priming and National Identity Targets
- Russell Sage Foundation
- Chapter
- Additional Information
84 Chapter 4 threat Priming and National identity targets L aws and public policies dole out punishment and distribute rewards . When people see government as punishing groups they dislike or do not trust, they may feel good about government action . if a policy rewards a group that citizens see in a positive light, that policy will also tend to be viewed favorably. But when laws and policies reward disliked groups, they can become deeply unpopular. this is target group theory. Looking at limits to tolerance and civil liberties support, classic public opinion scholarship focused on domestic groups that gained the dubious status of least liked among survey respondents (Sullivan, Piereson, and marcus 1982). analyzing support for voting rights, we found that americans were less likely to extend the franchise to violent ex-felons or those convicted of a sex offense than a generic ex-felon (manza, Brooks, and uggen 2004). a widely discussed example concerns welfare. a survey experiment provided evidence that white americans were twice as likely to support providing welfare benefits to a hypothetical white mother over a black mother with otherwise identical characteristics (Gilens 1999). Support for a range of social policies drops when the group receiving the benefit is identified as black or hispanic (Kinder and Sanders 1996). target group theory is well established in the study of public opinion and political psychology. our application of these ideas in this chapter is an extension. We hypothesize that national identity is a key source of target group differences when it comes to the domain of attitudes toward counterterrorism policies. our concern in this chapter focuses on a particularly novel kind of national target: the difference between americans and non-americans, or alternatively between u.S. citizens and foreign nationals. Complementing target group theory is the idea of threat priming: the process whereby information about terrorism plots or attacks is commuBrooks .indb 84 11/27/2012 9:55:36 AM threat Priming and National identity targets 85 nicated to individuals. We know from past work that such communications are likely to be consequential for individuals’ reasoning about counterterrorism. What we do in this chapter is update and extend scholarship by considering how threat priming works in relationship to national identity, and more specifically in the context of counterterrorism policies. We are able to develop this analysis using a set of novel experiments contained in the 2010 Surveys of american Policy attitudes (SaPa) data. most broadly, our results provide some new support for the relevance of target group theorizing. For understanding public support for counterterrorism policies, it can matter who people think these policies are targeting. But certain complexities are important as well. We find that attitudes toward the contentious practice of torture are unaffected by the national identity of a target. We contrast that result with the far greater degree of malleability in attitudes toward airport security and rights violations in the name of combatting terrorism. We also unpack a degree of complexity stemming from evidence that how much threat communication and target group perceptions matter can depend on factors such as level of education. Threat Priming, Target Groups, Experiments in investigating these questions, we face two related challenges at the outset. the general challenge is to make sure that it is really the national identity of a target that shapes counterterrorism attitudes, as opposed to something else. When survey respondents hear key phrases like “american citizens” or “foreign nationals,” we hope that they are thinking about the national identities of policy targets. But if they are thinking about something else, our evidence is flawed and inconclusive at best. So we begin with a simple question: What exactly are survey respondents thinking about when answering questions about american citizens or foreign nationals? this brings up a second challenge: the relevance of the threat-priming thesis. according to this theory, it is remarkably easy to get people primed to think about terrorism threats. threat priming is relevant if key phrases like “foreign nationals” also carry with them an implicit threat. When people hear this kind of language , do they feel threatened? until we determine a way of distinguishing the intrinsic target group component from any overlap with other potential threats, we will not have fully gotten at the mechanism behind policy reasoning. the challenge of distinguishing target group impacts from threat processes applies, in turn, when we consider threat priming as a candidate mechanism behind counterterrorism policy attitudes. an interesting possibility is that threat stimuli might themselves cause individuals...