Close
About
FAQ
Home
Collections
Login
USC Login
Register
0
Selected
Invert selection
Deselect all
Deselect all
Click here to refresh results
Click here to refresh results
USC
/
Digital Library
/
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
/
Politics is something we do together: identity and institutions in U.S. elections
(USC Thesis Other)
Politics is something we do together: identity and institutions in U.S. elections
PDF
Download
Share
Open document
Flip pages
Contact Us
Contact Us
Copy asset link
Request this asset
Transcript (if available)
Content
POLITICS IS SOMETHING WE DO TOGETHER:
IDENTITY AND INSTITUTIONS IN U.S. ELECTIONS
by
David Ebner
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Political Science and International Relations)
August 2020
Copyright 2020 David Ebner
Acknowledgments
I would not be here without my family – my parents Noel and Diane and my sister Jayne. And to
my friends - Brian Arnold, Will Andras, Leonard Lam, Jake Horowitz, and Austin George. I
would like to thank the relentless work of Drs. Christian Grose and Jane Junn of the University
of Southern California – without you I would not be here today. I also want to thank Drs. Morris
Levy, Abby Wood, and Christian Dyogi Phillips of the University of Southern California for their
essential contributions to this process as members of my committee and much more. I also want
to extend my deepest gratitude to Dr. Francisco Pedraza and all the scholars who make up the
PRIEC community for making me feel welcome in the discipline. I would also like to thank Dr.
Patrick James of the University of Southern California for his key insights in the foreign policy
elements of this dissertation and the mentorship he provided to me and so many others. And to
Dr. Gerry Munck – for showing me how to laugh and how to work. Most importantly, I would
like to thank the staff in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at USC –
especially Cathy Ballard, Veridiana Chavarin, and Linda Cole – for providing the support that I
and all the other graduate students needed to make it through. I would also like to acknowledge
Dr. Hakeem Jefferson of Stanford University and Ph.D candidate Kyle Rapp for their friendship
– mostly in the form of songs and drinks. Also, Drs. Joey Huddleston (Seton Hall) and Youssef
Chouhoud (Chistopher Newport) for showing me the ropes. Finally, to Jin Yan, Brian Knafou,
Ronan Fu, Mingmin Yang, Yu-Ting Lin, Cody Mathius, Tyler Curley, and everyone else I shared
a basketball court with – thank you and also I’m sorry. There are countless others, from
undergraduate students to graduate peers to senior faculty, without which I would not be here
today. We did it together, and I will do my best to pay it forward.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments...........................................................................................................................ii
Abstract...........................................................................................................................................vi
Essay 1: Divisive, Polarizing, or Energizing? Primary Election Competition and Candidate
Performance in U.S. Congressional Elections.................................................................................1
The Primary Penalty in U.S. Elections................................................................................3
The Primary Bonus Hypothesis...........................................................................................7
Data and Methods..............................................................................................................13
Results................................................................................................................................17
Discussion and Conclusion................................................................................................25
Essay 2: Extended Foreign Policy: Racial Resentment and White Americans’ Support for U.S.
Militarism.......................................................................................................................................30
Public Opinion and Foreign Policy....................................................................................33
Essay 3: V oting for Empire: The Racial Foundations of White Americans’ Support for U.S.
Military Policy...............................................................................................................................76
Introduction........................................................................................................................76
History and Background: Race and Military Attitudes and Intervention..........................81
Previous Studies of Whiteness...........................................................................................85
Research Design.................................................................................................................87
Results and Analysis..........................................................................................................92
Conclusion and Discussion................................................................................................97
References....................................................................................................................................102
Appendix Contents: Chapter 2.....................................................................................................127
Appendix Contents: Chapter 3.....................................................................................................134
iii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Marginal Effects of Primary Competition on Candidate Performance.........................20
Figure 2: Predicted Values for General Election V ote Share........................................................23
Figure 3: Predicted Values for Likelihood of Winning General Election.....................................25
Figure 4: Racialization of Public Opinion on Iran........................................................................50
Figure 5: China as Economic Threat (2012).................................................................................52
Figure 6: China as Military Threat (2012)....................................................................................52
Figure 7: Global War on Terror (2012).........................................................................................54
Figure 8: Public Opinion on ISIS (2016)......................................................................................58
Figure 9: Public Opinion on Syrian Refugees (2016)..................................................................59
Figure 10: China as Military Threat (2016)..................................................................................60
Figure 11: Public Opinion on Foreign Aid (ANES Cumulative)..................................................66
Figure 12: Current U.S. non-state Territories...............................................................................78
Figure 13: U.S. Military Bases in 2018 Source: Costs of War Project, Brown University (Brown
University 2020).............................................................................................................................78
Figure 14: Key Survey Measures of White In-Group Attitudes Used to Create Independent
Variables.........................................................................................................................................89
Figure 15: Dependent Variable Measuring Support for Militarized Foreign Policy.....................91
iv
INDEX OF TABLES
Table 1: Impact of Primary Competition on Candidate Performance...........................................18
Table 2: Impact of Primary Competition (GE V ote Share) by Incumbent/Challenger.................21
Table 3: Impact of Primary Competition (Won GE) by Incumbent/Challenger...........................22
Table 4: Racialization of Foreign Policy-Iran (2012)...................................................................49
Table 5: Racialization of Foreign Policy - China (2012)..............................................................51
Table 6: Racialization of Foreign Policy - GWOT (2012)............................................................53
Table 7: Racialization of Foreign Policy - GWOT (2016)............................................................55
Table 8: Racialization of Foreign Policy - ISIS/Syria (2016).......................................................57
Table 9: Racialization of Foreign Policy - Cumulative Survey (1986-2016)...............................62
Table 10: Public Opinion on Foreign Aid - ANES Cumulative Survey (1986-2016)...................65
Table 11: White Linked Fate and Militarism................................................................................92
Table 12: Perceived Discrimination Against Whites and Militarism............................................94
Table 13: White Identity and Militarism.......................................................................................95
v
Abstract
This dissertation is comprised of three essays. The central research question of Essay 1 of
my dissertation, “Divisive, Polarizing, or Energizing? The Impact of Primary Competition on
Candidate Strength” asks do competitive primary elections help parties win general elections?
Research in Latin American (Carey and Polga-Hecimovich 2006) shows that primary elections
are associated with candidate strength in elections, yet this has not been systematically studied in
U.S. legislative elections. I theorize that electoral competition in primaries will increase general
election success for candidates for two different but complementary reasons. First, candidates
and campaigns who engage in, and later emerge from, competitive electoral environments hone
skills, create systems, and develop expertise in campaign activity. They also recruit volunteers,
donors, and supporters via rigorous campaign activity which is not incentivized during non-
competitive elections. Second, voters in competitive elections are more engaged, attentive, and
apply higher scrutiny to their potential representatives. This means that the candidates who win
competitive primaries have been means-tested in an electoral environment which will include the
same constituency they will engage within the ensuing general election. This interaction between
voters and candidates during competitive elections leads to the development and selection of
candidates that receive more votes, and are therefore more likely to win, their general election.
My findings indicate that primary elections do indeed act a benefit to candidates, which
goes against conventional wisdom in American politics. Rather than assuming that the U.S. is the
exception to findings from Latin America, this article finds that in U.S. elections, competitive
primary elections result in a “primary bonus” for candidates who win them. Candidates who win
a competitive primary, my study finds, receive a significantly larger share of the vote and are
more likely to win their general election. This article is currently under review.
vi
How do race and racism impact foreign policy attitudes during elections? I explore this central
research question in Essays 2 and 3. In these studies, I focus on the attitudes of the electorate,
seeking to understand what motivates political choice and public opinion. I seek to apply theories
from the field of race and ethnicity to the study of foreign policy opinion by Americans. Lacking
knowledge or attention to foreign policy, many voters rely on heuristics to form their attitudes
about U.S. military intervention, the most observable form of U.S. foreign policy. Given the
centrality of race to the American political system, from slavery and colonization to
contemporary inequality, I theorize that foreign policy opinion in U.S. elections is highly
racialized.
In Essay 2, I focus on out-group attitudes among White Americans – racism – and how
they impact foreign policy beliefs. My findings demonstrate that racial resentment strongly
influences the willingness of many Americans to use military force, especially against nations or
peoples perceived to be non-White such as China, Iran, and potential terrorists. Partisanship,
ideology, and other sociodemographic factors also play a role, but attitudes about race and racism
are a major factor. Essays 3 turns to how in-group attitudes among White Americans – their
racial identity – influence foreign policy beliefs.
When it comes to military spending, the U.S. is exceptional among democracies in
regards to how much it spends on its military. The central research question of this essay, then, is
why are U.S. voters willing to spend so much money on the military? Using data from the
American National Election Survey (ANES) cumulative survey (1986-2016), I examine the
opinions of White Americans, finding that both outgroup attitudes like racial resentment and in-
group attitudes such as linked fate and racial identity strongly impact support for military
spending, feelings toward the military, and the willingness to use force to solve problems in the
vii
world. Since 1986, White Americans that express stronger attachment to their racial identity and
negative feelings towards racial outgroups support higher levels of military spending by the
federal government. Furthermore, strong racial attitudes about both oneself and others are
strongly associated with the belief that American military interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and
Afghanistan were worth the costs. Finally, racial resentment and White racial identity are
strongly associated with the belief that the U.S. should use military force to protect its interests
and less interested in diplomacy, human rights, economic development in foreign countries.
The findings of these essays demonstrate that social identities play a key role in shaping attitudes
about our most venerable political institutions and help address questions regarding why
Americans are so willing to outspend the rest of the world combined on national defense. This
study demonstrates that individual and group identities also play a role in motivating attitudes
and behavior regarding foreign policy. White Americans, especially those with high levels of
racial resentment, are more likely to favor using military force.
In Essay 2 and 3, my overall theory connecting attitudes on race and racism to foreign
policy beliefs derives from a combination of racial attitudes and socioeconomic factors which
leads White Americans to be more likely to view the military as an institution which protects and
promotes their interest and safety at home and abroad. Many White Americans are willing to
support high levels of defense spending with their tax dollars and U.S. policies that result in
casualties outside their socioeconomic cohort because they anticipate reaping the benefits of U.S.
military policies. In large part due to the connection between race and economic prosperity,
White Americans are more likely to feel invested in the conduct of U.S. military policy, whereas
others may perceive themselves, or the relatives and ancestors, to be just as likely to experience
the negative consequences of U.S. military policy.
viii
ix
Essay 1: Divisive, Polarizing, or Energizing? Primary Election Competition and Candidate
Performance in U.S. Congressional Elections
ABSTRACT: How do primary elections influence general election outcomes? The conventional
wisdom in American Politics predicts a “primary penalty” that harms a party or candidate’ s
chances of winning the ensuing general election. I present and test an alternative theory inspired
by comparative studies of Latin America: primary election competition results in a “primary
bonus” which may make candidates more likely to win the general election that follows. Despite
potential for polarization and divisiveness, robust primary competition encourages campaigns to
professionalize and mobilize voters, weeds out unfit candidates, and provides a testing ground
for messages and policies. Furthermore, the nature of the primary electorate and incumbency
advantage may mitigate the proposed sources of the penalty. Analysis of data collected from
multiple sources on all U.S. congressional elections (2008-2016) lends strong support to the
Primary Bonus hypothesis. Primary elections strengthen candidates for the general election,
contrary to extant theories in American politics. This study is the first to find a primary bonus in
U.S. congressional elections.
How do primary elections influence general election outcomes? The conventional
wisdom shared by academics in American politics and political pundits in the American media
holds that competitive primary elections are divisive, polarizing, and costly. Building on research
from comparative politics, this work advances an alternative theory: robust intraparty
competition helps political parties win elections. By focusing on U.S. presidential elections,
previous literature in American politics has found mixed support for the “primary penalty”
hypothesis, which is “the conventional view that the party whose candidate is obliged to fight a
1
hard primary campaign has an important strike against them upon entering the general election”
(Hacker 1965). This research, however, has generally not examined legislative elections. I argue
that in legislative elections there is in fact a primary bonus to candidates facing competitive
primaries. This bonus is conferred in the general election, where those who make it out of
competitive primaries learn campaign skills and build organizational capacity that improves their
general election performance.
To test my argument about the primary bonus, I present evidence from U.S. congressional
elections. The results point strongly in the direction of a “primary bonus” at the candidate level
for challengers and contestants in open seats. Candidates for both U.S. House of Representatives
and U.S. Senate, from both political parties, received a higher share of the vote in their general
election if they were the winners of competitive primaries when compared to candidates who
won noncompetitive primaries. Candidates who won competitive primaries were also more likely
to win their general election than candidates who won relatively noncompetitive primary
elections while controlling for constituency partisanship, expenditures, candidate quality, party,
and chamber.
Contrary to the scholarly conventional wisdom, there are reasons to expect that primary
elections energize the base, generate publicity, create opportunities for recruitment, provide
competition for incumbents, and expose the weaknesses of potential candidates at relatively little
cost to parties. Primaries are also a testing ground for the policies, candidates, and tactics that
affect outcomes in general elections. Support for this “primary bonus” hypothesis is generally in
contrast to the literature in American politics suggesting that divisive or competitive primaries
harm the eventual winner (Hacker 1965; Kenney and Rice 1987; Lengle, Owen, and Sonner
1995; Henderson, Hillygus, and Tompson 2010; though see Hogan 2003), but support the view
2
that primaries enhance the primary victor’s subsequent election chances (Atkeson 1998; Carey
and Polga-Hecimovich 2006). Examining Latin American presidential elections, Carey and
Polga-Hecimovich (2006, 530) find evidence for a significant “primary bonus” and they
summarize the theoretical disagreement thusly: “there are various reasons to expect primaries to
present an electoral liability relative to less participatory procedures for candidate selection” but
“if primaries are widely regarded as a democratic means of selecting candidates, and if voters
value intra-party democracy and are willing to reward it at the ballot box, then in elections where
candidates selected by primary compete against those selected by other methods, the former may
reap a ‘primary bonus’ rather than a penalty.”
Candidates that experience primary competition should outperform candidates who do
not, but this is not to say that factors like incumbency, geography, demographics, and fundraising
are not important drivers of electoral outcomes. However, in closely contested elections that
come down to a few percentage points the advantages of primary competition can mean the
difference between winning and losing. In the age of gerrymandering and partisan polarization
(Mayhew 1974; Jacobson 2009; Hirano 2010), primaries may increasingly be intraparty races
that are de facto general elections. There are also strong reasons to suggest that there is a
sophisticated relationship between the constituencies that support candidates in the primary
election and those they rely on in the general election (Fenno 1977). When combined with the
disagreement in the literature about the effect of primary competition, further analysis is clearly
necessary.
The Primary Penalty in U.S. Elections
Political parties were perhaps one of the most important additions to the U.S. system
outlined in the Constitution, but scholars credit the adoption of the direct primary election by
3
both the Republican and Democratic Parties in the mid-20
th
Century with depriving party bosses
and organizations of one of their main sources of institutional control over party nominations and
elected officials (Jacobson 2009; Ware 2002) Despite its weakening, the primary election
remains an important source of party influence. The view that intraparty competition “produces
or symbolizes fissures among a party’s supporters” (Hacker 1965) dominates the primary
competition literature. This penalty may exist because elections are divisive, creating intraparty
conflict that otherwise wouldn’t exist otherwise. The “primary penalty” may also manifest itself
in the form of polarization, pulling centrist candidates away from the median voter in the general
election or nominating ideologically extreme candidates that appeal to narrow constituencies
(Hall 2015). Lastly, competitive primaries may use up resources that candidates or parties would
prefer to use in the general election (Hacker 1965). A brief review of the literature on each of
these three potential sources of the “primary penalty” follows below.
Divisiveness: Primary elections may be divisive for two reasons: First, they may expose
intraparty weaknesses and lack of cohesion that causes voters to question their fitness for
governance (Hacker 1965; Kenney and Rice 1987; Lengle, Owen, and Sonner 1995; Makse and
Sokhey 2010). However, when controlling for election year context (Atkeson 1998), there seems
to be no evidence for the impact of divisiveness on general election outcomes at the
congressional or presidential level. Further scholarship indicates that the runoff system used by a
few select states harms a party’s chances of winning the subsequent general election (Fouirnaies
and Hall 2016
1
). Results for runoff elections are presented in Table A5 of the statistical appendix.
The second way in which primaries may be divisive is that supporters of the losing candidate
1 Unpublished manuscript
4
may abstain or defect in the ensuing general election from voting for the candidate they did not
support (Stone 1986; Henderson, Hillygus, and Tompson 2010).
Polarization: Primary elections may be polarizing because of a “tendency toward
ideological polarization within each partisan bloc” (McCann 1995), but primary voters may be
sophisticated enough to incorporate concepts like party unity and candidate electability in their
vote choices (Fenno 1977; Abramowitz 1989), suppressing any potential polarizing effect. While
some research finds support for “the idea that primaries pull candidates away from median
district preferences” (Brady, Han, and Pope 2007), others find that “rather than damaging the
partisan blocs, involvement in an ideologically charged campaign reinforced the activist’s
commitment to his or her party” (McCann 1995). Other research shows that primary type can
sometimes be associated with legislator ideological moderation (Grose 2020), suggesting that
primary competition, under some conditions, produces less extreme general election candidates.
Further research finds that “when extremists win primaries, they find a supremely challenging
electorate standing between them and legislative office” resulting in a state of affairs where the
nomination of the extremist appears to cause a large decrease in the party’s general-election vote
share” relative to a moderate candidate (Hall 2015, 31). Furthermore, “turnout appears to be the
dominant force in determining election outcomes, but it advantages ideologically moderate
candidates because extremists appear to activate the opposing party’s base more than their own.”
(Hall and Thompson 2018, 1). While these recent studies suggest extremist candidates perform
poorly in general elections, there is no evidence that competitive primaries themselves increase
the likelihood of extremist nominees.
Increased Costs: Incumbents also take costly action such as raising a “war chest” to
deter challengers (Box-Steffensmeier 1996). Every dollar spent, every volunteer shift recruited,
5
and every policy concession made in the primary election is one that candidates cannot use in the
general election. Polarization is itself a “cost” of primary elections given the gravity of the
median voter (Black 1948) and Duverger’s Law (Riker 1982) on models of electoral politics
(Cox 2010; Peress 2010). Primary constituencies are different from general election
constituencies in important ways (Fenno 1978), and members of Congress undertake costly
actions to try to please multiple constituencies (Grose, Malhotra, and Parks Van Houweling
2015). The literature is in broad agreement that no matter the effect of primary elections, they
place candidates in a bind between these differing constituencies, and this alone may be enough
to confer a “primary penalty” on otherwise viable candidates.
In sum, previous literature has not found empirical support for the theory that this
process affects general election performance. Prior research has focused on U.S. presidential
elections and has produced mixed findings using a variety of methods and techniques. Despite
the strong theoretical reasons for expecting a negative impact on candidate strength from primary
competition, the statistical evidence points in different directions and falls short of making a
convincing case when taken in totality. Finding the literature linking primary elections to general
elections “limited both empirically and theoretically” (Carey and Polga-Hecimovich 2006),
comparativists have sought to evaluate the relationship by examining Latin American
presidential elections. In the U.S. case, party primaries are nearly ubiquitous and were
implemented at the same time by both parties, leaving researchers without a comparison group.
In Latin America, however, the pattern of primary elections is “irregular, such that there are
abundant examples of primary-selected versus nonprimary-selected candidates” (Carey and
Polga-Hecimovich 2006). This research not only fails to find evidence of a “primary penalty”
conferred due to electoral competition, its findings suggest that candidates who compete in
6
democratic primaries actually receive a “primary bonus” compared to those nominated by
noncompetitive mechanisms.
The Primary Bonus Hypothesis
Previous literature has exposed the theoretical hurdles to analyzing the connection
between primary elections and general election outcomes. This research has focused mainly on
Presidential elections (Stone 1986; Kenney and Rice 1987; Abramowitz 1989; McCann 1995;
Lengle, Owen, and Sonner 1995; Atkeson 1998; Makse and Sokhey 2010; Henderson, Hillygus,
and Tompson 2010) or on important, but narrow, geographic regions (Hacker 1965; Stone 1986;
Makse and Sokhey 2010), which means scholars are confronted with a lack of cases necessary
for statistical comparison and broad generalizability. Focus on the presidency or on “bellwether”
districts is understandable, but because both parties moved to similar nominating mechanisms at
the same time and almost every presidential cycle is extremely competitive, even if there were
more cases the data would still lack the variation needed for statistical comparison. To help
mediate these two weaknesses in previous research, I turn to U.S. congressional elections. Not
only are there many more congressional elections than presidential ones, unlike presidential
races some congressional primaries are noncompetitive, creating a valuable comparison group to
explore the relationship between primary competition and general election performance.
The last major theoretical hurdle to overcome is determining under what conditions we
would expect either a “primary penalty” due to divisiveness, polarization, or resource depletion.
Previous literature has sought to use defection rate (Stone 1986), difference in primary vote share
between candidates (Kenney and Rice 1987; Atkeson 1998), voter evaluations of candidates
(Abramowitz 1989), citizen activism (McCann 1995), election results (Makse and Sokhey 2010;
Henderson, Hillygus, and Thompson 2010), institutional differences (Lengle, Owen, and Sonner
7
1995), or the closeness of the election (Hacker 1965) to measure primary election competition,
but each of these measures suffers from endogeneity because they use an election’s results to
“predict” the competitiveness of that election only in hindsight.
I instead use an exogenous measure (Cook’s Political Report Race Ratings) to identify
competitive elections before they take place, which may better set conditions under which we
would expect to see a statistical correlation (whether positive, negative, or null) between primary
election competitiveness and general election outcomes. While findings from runoff elections as
an instrument for primary election competition are suggestive (Fouirnaies and Hall 2016)
2
,
questions remain about generalizability to a wider set of cases.
In marginal districts, the “primary bonus” could mean the difference between a win and a
loss. In an era of partisan polarization where fewer and fewer seats are contested (Abramowitz
2010), the few remaining “swing” districts become even more consequential. For the purposes of
comparison back to U.S. presidential cases and beyond it also makes sense to focus on
competitive elections. However, the most important reason to focus on competitive elections
relates to the process that links competitive primary elections to stronger general election
candidate performance. There are four mechanisms that cause candidates that win competitive
primary elections to be stronger than candidates who do not face difficult primaries: 1) the nature
of the primary constituency mitigates the potentially harmful effects of intraparty competition; 2)
competitive primaries allow the incumbency advantage to take effect, resulting in relatively
proven and experienced candidates moving on to the general election; 3) primaries weed out
potentially unfit challengers; and 4) competitive primaries create organizational advantages by
moving up the timetable for resource recruitment and by providing the candidate and staff with
2 Unpublished manuscript.
8
exposure, expertise and training. I explain how each of these can affect improved general
election chances in greater detail below.
1. The Primary Constituency. While primary electorates are typically more polarized
than their general election counterparts in U.S. Congressional elections (Brady, Han, and Pope
2007) the electorate is also typically more informed and attentive (Fenno 1978). In fact, evidence
shows that voters take “electability” into account when voting in primary elections (Abramowitz
1989). The relative political sophistication of the primary constituency mitigates the “primary
penalty” that may be imposed on candidates who have to cater to a relatively extreme base,
which may prevent them from being able to appeal to the median voter in the ensuing general
election (Black 1948; Downs 1957). Institutional reforms, such as open primary elections, have
been shown to have some impact on the ideological polarization of candidates and this may be
one reason why.
The nature of the primary electorate also prevents “divisiveness” in terms of intraparty
competition from having deleterious effects on candidate performance. The most obvious reason
is that strong partisans who make up primary electorates do not present a credible threat for
defection. No matter how divisive the primary election, voters that identify with a political party
almost always strictly prefer the candidate from their party to the candidate from another. While
we have seen elite selection processes like party conventions become “divisive” (Hacker 1965),
no evidence exists that democratic primary elections have the same potential for weakening
candidates in the subsequent general election. It seems that primary elections present neither the
risk of increased ideological polarization of candidates nor the potential for intraparty
divisiveness that will reduce electoral support in the general election that the conventional
wisdom and previous literature suggests. It may instead be the case that primary elections
9
“energize” the base, allowing activists from across the spectrum to have their voices heard and
participate in the process (Cox 2010; Peress 2010). More concretely, the supporters that
candidates recruit during the primary phase give the candidate a head start on staffing,
organization, and development of campaign strategy and tactics.
2. Organizational Advantages. Electoral success depends on more than just a
candidate’s ideological position in a spatial model. It also requires effectively framing,
communicating, and arguing for that ideological position in reference to their opponent
(persuasion) and their potential supporters (mobilization). The impact of primary competition on
ideological positioning has been the main focus of the debate about the impact of primary
competition on candidate strength in previous literature (Brady, Han, and Pope 2007; Cox 2010;
Peress 2010), but I expect its influence on persuasion and mobilization to be equally important
mechanisms that lead to the “primary bonus” I observe in U.S. Congressional elections.
While ideological positioning presents something of an opportunity cost, persuasion and
mobilization require more time and material resources. Political advertising, door-to-door
canvassing, phone calls, public appearances, and branded campaign materials are very
expensive. Persuasion and mobilization also require expertise, data, and staff to generate
strategies and tactics, and these often come in the form of paid staff or outside consultants or
untrained volunteers. Undertaking this type of effort during a primary election may force a
candidate to expend resources that they could otherwise use during the general election. Despite
this, candidates who expend these resources will be comparatively better off than candidates who
avoid primary competition because they get an earlier start on the costly and difficult process of
recruiting money, staff, knowledge, volunteers, and partisan among the public and elite. Staff that
engage in persuasion and mobilization will gain valuable knowledge and experience that is
10
directly transferable to the general election. Candidates are forced to test their messaging and
personality with the electorate much earlier and more frequently than they would without a
primary. The presence of robust primary competition moves up the timetable for campaign
organization and professionalization by several months. Election Day for a campaign is
demanding, stressful, and often chaotic during competitive elections. If multiple candidates have
run voter mobilization or persuasion efforts in the primary, they have most likely been contacting
different groups of voters, meaning a wider percentage of the partisan electorate has been
contacted (Gerber, Green, and Shachar 2003). The primary election also gives candidates an
opportunity for exposure to the public and the media that they otherwise may not have had.
3. The Incumbency Advantage. Previous literature indicates that primary elections are
one environment where the incumbency advantage has the biggest influence (Ansolabehere et al.
2007). This advantage can work by a) deterring potential quality challengers from entering the
race, or b) providing name recognition, fundraising networks, and experienced staff or
volunteers. Accordingly, robust competition should expose particularly weak incumbents who
may have become unresponsive, have failed to provide constituent services, are embroiled in
scandal, or were ineffective legislators. Primary competition helps prevent parties or partisans
from sending weak incumbents to the general election. This relationship illuminates the conflict
in preferences between political elites and their electorate. The party and the voter are both
interested in sending the strongest candidate to the polls for the general election, while elites are
interested in their own success. Competitive primary elections weaken the incumbency
advantage by eliminating weak incumbents at the primary stage, thereby preventing them from
entering the general election. Strong incumbents, however, will likely win a competitive primary
election and advance to the general election. Given that campaign spending is much more closely
11
associated with the fate of challengers than incumbents (Jacobson 2006), depletion of an
incumbent’s “war chest” in the primary phase should not have a significant impact on their
general election chances However, this resource depletion may present a more significant
obstacle for challengers.
4. Weeding-out. Primary competition not only exposes weak incumbents, it also exposes
weak challengers. It seems reasonable to expect that candidates who are unable to convince their
own partisans of their viability would have an even harder time of convincing the median voter
of being worthy of their vote. Primary elections “vet” candidates through a subset of the
electorate. We might then expect candidates who win one election to be more likely to win
another election, especially if they can recruit the same voters to vote for them in the general
election. Scandal and personal or political history unattractive to the electorate are exposed either
by voter investigation or, more likely, by opposition research undertaken by their opponent(s)
(Times n.d.). Weak candidates are exposed by the constraints of electoral competition and it is
better for the party and the voter if these weaknesses are exposed in the primary phase rather
than the general election, where competition may be even fiercer, and the opposition more
motivated and better organized. This process may be “divisive,” but only in the sense that all
electoral competition is divisive. The competition is a feature, not a bug, of the primary system,
in the United States and elsewhere (Carey and Polga-Hecimovich 2006).
Because competitive primary elections 1) energize the base rather than polarize, 2) weed-
out unfit challengers rather than deter strong ones, 3) protect strong incumbents rather than
expose them, and 4) increase some critical resources even while they deplete others, I expect
candidates who win a competitive primary election to receive a higher share of the vote, and will
be more likely to win their election, when compared to candidates who did not experience
12
primary competition. Using a nationwide sample while controlling for state, district, and race-
specific factors that previous literature has shown to be important in determining general election
outcomes, I find strong support for a correlation between primary competition and general
election success. Candidates in competitive general elections who won a competitive primary
received a higher vote share and were more likely to win their general election than candidates
who did not experience intraparty competition. From the end of the primary to the end of the
general election, differences in candidates, districts, and elections will obviously lead to variance
in outcomes. The time that elapses between the primary and the general election can be thought
of as the period in which the mechanism for the “primary bonus” can take effect. It may be there
case that there are differential effects in the “primary bonus” based on the amount of time that
elapses between the end of the primary and the general election, but for now this will remain
outside the scope of this analysis, but may offer grounds for further research into the mechanisms
and processes that may lead to the “primary bonus.”
Data and Methods
I test this argument in the case of U.S. congressional elections. Using OLS and Logit
regression, I evaluate the Primary Bonus hypothesis by analyzing data from every U.S.
Congressional election in the Senate and House of Representatives from five elections from 2008
to 2016, which covers 4,784 candidates in primary elections. This time period was selected
because it was the full time period for which data on the key dependent and independent
variables was publicly available.
Measurement and Operationalization: Following Carey and Polga-Hecimovich (2006)
and Hacker (1965), I will compare the general election performance of candidates exposed to
13
primary competition and those who are able to deter or avoid it. The unit of analysis is the
candidate, and the question is whether primary competition produces stronger or weaker
candidates than less competitive primaries.
The first dependent variable is general election performance, measured as the percentage
of the vote received in the general election (0-1) and this model will be estimated using OLS
regression. The mean vote share for all candidates in the sample was 48.1 percent. The second
dependent variable is whether the candidate won or lost the general election, coded 1 for a win or
0 for a loss, and will therefore be estimated using Logit regression.
The key independent variable in this analysis is an interaction between Primary
Competition and Cook’s Ratings. The first component of the independent variable is primary
competition (I will describe Cook’s Ratings in more detail below). Candidates who received 75
percent or more of the vote in the primary election are coded 0, candidates with less than 75
percent are coded 1. Hacker (1965) used 65 percent as the cutoff to distinguish competitive from
noncompetitive. In this sense, Hacker (1965) provides a valuable analytical framework by
looking at primary election results to determine the level of competition between candidates.
While Hacker (1965) admits this cutoff is “arbitrary” it is a simple and concise way to measure
electoral competitiveness. To bolster this measure, I interviewed five campaign managers who
have worked on legislative campaigns, asking them “what percentage would a challenger need to
poll in order to make you spend money that you would rather save for the general?” Each
claimed that a competitive challenger may receive lower than 35 percent (Hacker’s measure).
Their answers range from 10-30 percent, but most were closer to 25 percent
3
. Thus, I use the 25
percent cutoff to measure a competitive primary instead of Hacker’s 35 percent. While I
3 Their answers were “1 percent”, two responses of “25 percent”, “15 percent”, and “20 percent”.
14
ultimately settle on 75 percent as the cutoff, my basic reasoning mirrors previous literature
(Hacker 1965; Atkeson 1998). To check for robustness, I analyze models using several
alternative specifications of primary competition in Tables A1 and A2 of the Appendix. None of
the alternative specifications produce statistically or substantively significant differences.
The second component of the key independent variable is general election
competitiveness. Candidates whose primary election is the de facto general election or whose
winners are not viable general election candidates based on district-specific factors do not
campaign in the same way that candidates in close, head-to-head matchups do. I expect the
“primary bonus” to become substantively important when candidates are in a contested general
election. In Presidential elections, almost every candidate has some reasonable chance of
winning based on the partisan distribution of voters and the presence of the Electoral College.
Absent these structural factors, many U.S. congressional general elections, where incumbency
and gerrymandering prevail (Mayhew 1974; Jacobson 2009), are simply not competitive.
Previous literature that looked at legislative or gubernatorial elections has used the results of the
elections themselves to determine competitiveness. I argue that this method (and others in the
previous literature) suffer from endogeneity that potentially biases the results of quantitative
analysis.
Fortunately, a more exogenous measure of competition in U.S. Congressional elections is
available from Cook’s Political Report (“The Cook Political Report - Charts - 2012 House
Competitive Races” n.d.). Cook’s publishes a list of races they expect to be closely contested in
November. Cook’s updates its list throughout the campaign season, but I use the earliest report
available in each year (April). Candidates in districts on this report are coded 1, all others coded
0. An alternative specification using a four-point continuous measure of Cook’s ratings is
15
including in Table A4 of the Appendix. This measure correlated well (.58) with a measure of
competitiveness just based on results (general election races that finished within 20 points of
each other), and by using the candidate’s raw vote share (between 40 and 60 percent). The timing
of this report (early April) also means that it is after almost all primaries
4
but before general
elections are in full swing. In Table A3 in the Appendix I also estimate a model using these
alternative measures, and the findings and results hold.
Also included in the model are additional independent variables for incumbency, party,
chamber, candidate quality, opponent’s fundraising, and presidential vote share by congressional
district. Incumbency is one of the most widely-studied and reliable predictors of outcomes in
U.S. Congressional elections, with incumbents routinely winning ninety percent of their bids for
re-election (Ansolabehere et al. 2007). Controlling for the candidate’s party helps mitigate the
impact of national or regional electoral trends or waves, or either benefitting or suffering from
sharing a party with the President. I examine both House and Senate elections, so I include a
binary measure for chamber. While Atkeson (1998) makes a compelling case for not including
measures of challenger quality, I ultimately decide to include a binary measure for quality
challengers (Bond, Covington, and Fleisher 1985). For each candidate I also include a variable
for campaign expenditures, measured as a ratio of candidate spending/opponents spending in
dollars (millions). While the literature suggests that expenditures are more important for
challengers than incumbents (Jacobson 2006), the impact of money in politics is of great
substantive and theoretical interest. In Table A5 of the Appendix I present results that indicate
that my findings are robust to alternative measurements of this component of electoral
competition including candidate expenditures and opponent’s expenditures. There may be
4The first round of primaries in Texas was March 6th, 2018, while the second round was held on May
22nd. The Illinois primary took place on March 20th, 2018.
16
reasons to expect that who wins a primary may influence the willingness of the national parties
or large political action committees to spend money and resources on the campaign and may be
one source of the remaining uncertainty the statistical models analyzed. Data regarding spending
by “outside” groups is not included in the analysis but presents a potential avenue for further
research.
I also control at the district level for House races and at the state level for Senate races for
the percentage of votes that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (for Democrats) or John McCain,
Mitt Romney, or Donald Trump (for Republicans) received to control for underlying partisanship
in the district. Recent research on primary institutions has indicated that the Top-2 primary may
impact the types of candidates that win and lose general elections, so I have included a dummy
variable for this as well (Alvarez and Sinclair 2015). Together, these variables can broadly be
thought of as the “fundamentals” that previous literature has shown to be important determinants
of electoral outcomes in U.S. Congressional races. Consistent with this literature, I expect each
to be significant, but not to completely obscure the impact of primary competition. From a
theoretical standpoint, including these additional independent variables should help isolate the
independent effect of primary competition on general election vote shares (Atkeson 1998).
Results
The estimates from Model 1, an OLS regression with general election vote share as the
dependent variable, and Model 2, a Logit regression with win/loss as the dependent variable, are
presented in Table 1. Overall, I find strong support for the Primary Bonus hypothesis: robust
primary competition is correlated with stronger candidate performance. In U.S. congressional
elections from 2008-2016, candidates in competitive general elections that were nominative by
17
competitive primary elections received 5.7 percent greater vote share (significant at p<.001) and
were 11 percent more likely to win their general election (significant at p<.001) than candidates
nominated by noncompetitive processes, controlling for presidential vote share, incumbency,
whether the contested seat was open or not, candidate expenditures, party, candidate experience,
primary system, and whether the seat was for the Senate or House of Representatives.
Consistent with previous literature, while the impact of primary competition is
statistically and substantively significant, it does not outweigh the influence of partisan loyalty or
18
Table 1: Impact of Primary Competition on Candidate Performance
incumbency. Candidate quality was also a significant predictor of general election success.
Interestingly, while outspending one’s opponent was a good indicator of increasing vote share, it
did not have a statistically significant impact on a candidate’s likelihood of winning the general
election
5
. The results also support the hypothesis that the Top-2 primary system is successful at
increasing competition.
Finally, over the time period analyzed (2008-2016), Democrats were about 8 percent less
likely to win their general election despite no statistically significant differences in vote share.
While most of the results conformed to theoretical expectations and previous literature, this
result is worth unpacking since there are likely at least three major factors at play here. The first,
and most central to the theory of the Primary Bonus, is the Tea Party movement, which was very
successful at using the primary system to challenge moderate Republican incumbents and
candidates for open seats in formerly uncontested districts. This means that the GOP was sending
stronger candidates to compete in general elections, adversely impacting the Democrats’ chances
of winning. Second, the Tea Party movement may only have accentuated a historical trend of the
party of the incumbent President suffering Congressional losses. And given the supermajority in
the Senate and large gains in 2006 in the House of Representatives, one could argue the
Democrats should have been expected to lose a considerable number of seats. Finally, and
perhaps most interesting, is the so-called “House effect” for Republicans resulting from
geography, political culture, apportionment, and perhaps a competitive advantage in
gerrymandering (Jacobson 2009). Figure 1 and Figure 2 presents the results from a fixed-effects
model, which standardizes coefficients to improve the ease of interpretation of substantive
5 This may be due to either a few outlier challengers (Like Linda McMahon, Senate Candidate in
Connecticut who spent enormous sums in losing efforts), or more likely, due to disparities in how candidates spend
their money.
19
results, as well as comparison between the OLS model for vote share and the Logit estimates for
win/loss.
One of the strongest findings in the Congressional literature is that there are major differences in
electoral fates between incumbents, challengers, and contestants for open seats (Jacobson 2009).
In Table 2 and Table 3 I have broken down the results of the analysis by whether the candidate
was an incumbent, challenger, or contestant for an open seat (previous candidate experience is
already included as a control variable).
20
Figure 1: Marginal Effects of Primary Competition on Candidate
Performance
21
Table 2: Impact of Primary Competition (GE Vote Share) by
Incumbent/Challenger
22
Table 3: Impact of Primary Competition (Won GE) by
Incumbent/Challenger
To further explore the relationship between the two components of the “Primary Bonus”
variable, “Competitive Primary” and “Cook’s Competitiveness Rating”, I employ a fixed-effects
model to estimate levels of the dependent variable (general election vote share) for all
configurations of the variables that make up the interaction term.
6
The results of the analysis are
displayed in Figure 3 and Figure 4 as predicted probabilities for values of the dependent variable
for selected variables of the independent variable while fixing all other variables at their mean.
Since the independent variable of interest, the Primary Bonus, is an interaction term coded as a
binary variable, this allows for relatively simply comparisons between configurations of the
components of the interaction term in configurations that are substantively interesting.
6STATA program spost9 (“Stata Bookstore: Regression Models for Categorical Dependent Variables Using
Stata, Third Edition” n.d.) was employed for analysis.
23
Figure 2: Predicted Values for General Election Vote Share
Looking first at candidates for open seats, support for the Primary Bonus hypothesis is
very strong. While it may be intuitive that primary competition may hurt incumbents and/or
challengers, previous theory would anticipate the primary penalty in terms of divisiveness,
costliness, or polarization to be strongest when two candidates are competing for a competitive,
open seat. Candidates for competitive, open seats in U.S. congressional elections from 2008-
2016 won 11.5 percentage points more of the vote in their general election while controlling for
incumbency, presidential vote share, and a host of other factors previous literature has linked to
electoral performance, when they won a competitive primary. Candidates for competitive, open
seats also won their election 16 percent more often than candidates nominated through
noncompetitive primaries or other selection processes. While the magnitudes of the effects on
their own are strong, also note that primary competition moves expectations for vote share and
likelihood of winning past the majoritarian threshold, at least while all other variables are held at
their mean.
The results for challengers also strongly support the Primary Bonus hypothesis.
Challengers who emerge from competitive primaries won 11 percentage points more (significant
at p<.001) of the vote than candidates who were nominated by noncompetitive processes and
were 42 percent more likely to win their election (significant at p<.001). Overall, challengers are
relatively unlikely to defeat incumbent legislators, but parties can seemingly double their odds of
victory by holding a robust primary.
24
Discussion and Conclusion
While considerable debate exists over the role of candidate quality in electoral outcomes,
this research supports the hypothesis that candidate quality is a key factor in two important ways.
First, previous political experience for non-incumbents significantly improves the electoral
chances for challengers and contestants for open seats (the independent variable Quality
Challenger). Second, competitive primaries may produce stronger candidates by
professionalizing campaigns, building name recognition, and weeding out unfit candidates.
Democratic and competitive nominating mechanisms produce challengers who won more votes
in the general election and won their elections more frequently. This has important effects at the
individual level for candidates, but looking at the bigger picture, it also has important
25
Figure 3: Predicted Values for Likelihood of Winning General Election
ramifications for electoral competition overall. Based on this analysis, a significant predictor of
weak challengers is a weak primary to nominate them. This supports previous literature which
argues that “many incumbents win easily by wide margins because they face inexperienced,
sometimes reluctant, challengers who lack the financial and organizational backing to mount a
serious campaign for Congress” (Jacobson 2009).
Given that primary competition seems to increase the quality of challengers for
congressional seats we should expect robust primary challenges to weaken an incumbent during
the subsequent general election, especially in situations where the primary is not the de facto
general election given the partisan makeup of the district or state. For incumbents in competitive
general elections, candidates who win a competitive primary receive about 12 percent fewer
votes than incumbents that deter challengers (significant at p<.001) and won 30 percent less
often (significant at p<.001). While this finding is striking, it does potentially limit the findings
of the Primary Bonus hypothesis to non-incumbents. However, some caution in both directions is
warranted for several reasons. Incumbents who receive a primary challenge my perform poorly
because primaries are divisive, costly, and polarizing as the conventional wisdom suggests.
However, it seems more likely that weak incumbents invite challengers, as argued by a
competing set of literature (Box-Steffensmeier 1996). Primary elections increase the level of
electoral competition by strengthening challengers and candidates for open seats and by
mitigating the incumbency advantage, at least for relatively weak incumbents. While strong
incumbents are often able to deter challengers by raising a war chest, using the resources and
prestige of their office, and by working with party elites to steer quality challengers in other
directions, weak incumbents seem particularly susceptible to the “weeding-out” effects of
primary competition.
26
In terms of the wider debate about the impact of primary competition and general election
performance, the record is mixed. This paper presents important findings that support a “primary
bonus” and argues against a “primary penalty” in U.S. elections. Given this finding, we should
expect that if one of the major parties abandoned the democratic primary system they would do
relatively poorly compared to an opponent who survived a competitive primary. From one
standpoint, particularly, that of the candidate or officeholder, it is easy to understand the support
for the idea that primary elections are divisive or polarizing, but analysis of the data suggest that
these normative discomforts are part of an important process that in the end rewards parties with
stronger candidates and better-run campaigns. While there is some question as to whether these
results on legislative elections generalize to Presidential contests in the U.S., the absence of a
correlation between the type of seat and the “primary bonus” is a further suggestion that this
finding is generalizable beyond the data analyzed. Finally, given that the impact of primary
competition is not correlated with partisanship, it seems unwise for either party to abandon the
current primary system altogether. If one party was to move to an elite-selection process or chose
not to challenge incumbents, this research suggests they might suffer in competitive general
elections overall.
In 2012 alone, 63 Congressional elections were decided by 6 points or less (“United
States Congressional Elections Results, 2012 - Ballotpedia” n.d.). Congressional candidates in
these elections who emerged from a competitive primary received a greater vote share and were
more likely to win their general election than candidates who were nominated by noncompetitive
mechanisms from 2008-2016. Consistent with expectations, incumbency, presidential vote
percentage, and opponent’s fundraising were the most significant predictors of electoral
performance.
27
This research contributes to several different fields and subfields of political science. First
and foremost, it contributes to the wider argument, across nations, about institutional design for
either states or parties when they negotiate processes for candidate selection. Analysis of U.S.
Presidential elections on their own is difficult and has produced mixed results, but we now have
good statistical and theoretical evidence from Latin American Presidential elections and U.S.
Senate and House elections that competitive primaries produce stronger candidates. Given this,
we should assume that both Presidential candidates are usually benefitting from the primary
bonus, but the effects are more or less canceling each other out under the rare circumstances in
which there is no incumbent on the ballot. The effect may also be smaller given the relative
professionalization of presidential campaigns and availability of resources when compared to
Congressional elections.
This research also has important consequences for U.S. Congressional literature on
primary elections, general elections, candidate selection, campaign strategy, voter mobilization,
and persuasion. When considering phenomena that influence general election processes or
outcomes, this research makes it clear that analysis of candidates and campaigns should begin in
the primary phase. By linking the nature of primary competition to general election outcomes
using an exogenous measure of general election competitiveness and a viable comparison group,
I have identified important determinants of candidate strength and performance based on the
level of primary competition they experience. Not only this, but contrary to expectations, non-
incumbents perform better, not worse, after tough primaries. Primary competition may give
candidates an advantage in terms of recruiting the resources necessary for effective persuasion
and mobilization of voters. It may be interesting to see how voter contact in the primary connects
to voter contact in general elections. If we start from the assumption that primaries are good for
28
political parties and for voters instead of bad, then campaigns, the media, voters, and political
scientists may look at them in a much different light. While in the moment these elections seem
divisive, polarizing, or costly, a broader statistical analysis indicates that democratic primaries
are a normative good for participatory democracy in general and in the American case
specifically. It seems likely that instead of being the exception, U.S. Presidential candidates also
benefit from competitive primary elections.
It is easy for politicians, voters, and especially the media, to focus on the negatives of
primary elections. In the moment they do seem polarizing, divisive, and costly, especially if you
are the candidate or a supporter in the midst of a close election. As political scientists, we have to
take the long view, much like the same Democratic partisans did in 2008 when cooler and more
thoughtful heads prevailed. No one likes to lose, but people like to lose general elections much
less than primary elections. When elections are tight, it seems to pay for both voters and parties
to have a candidate who has been through a tough primary election. Despite its potential costs,
intraparty competition makes for stronger candidates of all types. Future research could explore
the individual mechanisms that this theory asserts to be the causes of this effect: weeding out of
unfit candidates, engagement of ideological constituencies, activation of the base, moving up the
timetable for organizational capacity-building, and increased voter and media attention. Many of
the processes theorized to be behind the primary penalty (divisiveness, polarization, and
costliness) have been explored. Given previous evidence from the literature (Atkeson 1998;
Carey and Polga-Hecimovich 2006) and this research, perhaps we should look on the other side
of the coin for the relationship between primary competition and general election outcomes.
Research on the topic may be more fruitful if instead of looking for penalties, we look for
bonuses.
29
Essay 2: Extended Foreign Policy: Racial Resentment and White Americans’ Support for
U.S. Militarism
U. S. foreign policy has an immense impact internationally. The U.S. in the 20th and 21st Century
has been described by scholars as a “great power” (Mearsheimer 2001), a “hegemon” (Cox 2001), and an
“empire” (Bacevich 2004; Immerwahr 2019). The U.S. experienced only seventeen years of peace –
defined as no major war – between 1776 and 2020. In 2016, the United States deployed military forces to
138 countries – nearly 70 percent of the world’s countries (Turse 2017). In the same year, the U.S.
military budget, which passed 85-15 in the Senate and 277-177 in the House of Representatives was $611
billion – by far the most in the world. Furthermore, 7,005 U.S. servicemembers have been killed and
52,864 wounded in ongoing campaigns as of 2018 and, just as importantly, U.S. interventions have
incurred tremendous costs in foreign lives. While strongly influenced by unelected bureaucrats in
agencies like the State Department and Department of Defense (Choi et al. 2020), U.S. foreign policy is
mainly the responsibility of its elected officials. While the President plays a primary role in decision-
making, Congress, and to a lesser extent, the Supreme Court, also play a role in setting foreign policy.
This places the American public firmly in the center of the politics of foreign policy where, at the very
least, “[p]ublic opinion provides one constraint on the strategies of elites” (White 2019, 26). Indeed,
scholars have found that foreign policy has played a major role in both presidential and congressional
elections from the Cold War and Vietnam to Iraq and the Global War on Terror (Fawn and Hinnebusch
2006; Grose and Oppenheimer 2007; Baum and Groeling 2010). At the same time, U.S. voters are often
characterized as uninformed and/or inattentive when it comes to politics in general and may be especially
so when it comes to foreign policy (Almond 1950; Converse 1964; Verba et al. 1967; Lau, Brown, and
Sears 1978; Zaller 1992). This creates an apparent contradiction, since at minimum a “democracy requires
that citizens’ opinions play some role in shaping policy outcomes, including in foreign policy” (M. A.
Baum and Potter 2008). In this essay, I argue that racial attitudes provide structure to American public
opinion regarding foreign policy.
30
Previous research indicates that both domestic and foreign policy attitudes among the American
public are strongly driven by ideology and partisanship (Rosenau et al. 2006; Nincic and Ramos 2010;
Eoyang and Billerbeck 2014). Furthermore, the shadow of political polarization (Mason 2018) and
negative partisanship (Bitecofer 2019) that looms over our contemporary political era extends even to
foreign policy, which was previously thought to be above the partisan fray (Jeong and Quirk 2019). This
similarity in the relationship between foreign and domestic attitudes regarding partisanship indicates that
other features of American political culture that influence domestic politics may have a strong role in
foreign policy, as well. Previous research has examined the role of political elites (Bullock 2011; Gilens
and Page 2014; M. A. Baum and Potter 2008), the news media (Kull, Ramsay, and Lewis 2003),
patriotism (McCleary, Nalls, and Williams 2009), and ethnocentrism (Kam and Kinder 2007). While
compelling, extant theories regarding attitude formation regarding foreign policy among the U.S. public
have left under-examined what is the central organizing feature of much of American society and politics
(Omi and Winant 2014): the issue of race and its impact on the attitudes and behavior of Americans,
especially those identifying as White (Devine 1989; Hirschfeld 1998; Bargh 1999; Hutchings and
Valentino 2004; King and Smith 2005).
The racialization of elite and public attitudes around domestic issues such as welfare, crime, and
affirmative action is well-established in the literature (Hutchings and Valentino 2004; Gilens 1996).
Immigration attitudes have also been shown to be highly racialized (Citrin et al. 1997; Masuoka and Junn
2013; Levy and Wright 2020). However, relatively little attention has been paid to how race may
influence public attitudes regarding U.S. foreign policy (DeConde 1992). In this paper, I argue that,
lacking specific information, the public largely relies on heuristics to form their attitudes about foreign
31
policy. Similar to domestic policy, while partisanship and ideology provide meaningful cues, the structure
of US foreign policy attitudes among the public also includes a second dimension: social identities like
race, class, gender, and sexuality. While multiple social identities are salient to political attitudes and
beliefs for each individual, the central analytical claim of this essay is that foreign policy attitudes among
the American public are highly racialized.
I theorize that White Americans project their racial views regarding domestic politics into the
international sphere, leading racially resentful individuals to be more likely to perceive actions by non-
White actors as threatening and more likely to support the use of military force in response to these
threats. Previous literature has theorized that the “images” peoples and nations have of others shape their
decision making in foreign policy (Alexander, Levin, and Henry 2005; Herrmann 2013; Herrmann and
Fischerkeller 1995). This study seeks to examine this theory regarding racial views among White
Americans. To build my case, I analyze public opinion data from the American National Election Survey
(ANES), regarding 1) support for U.S. military interventions, 2) supporting increases in military
spending, and 3) perceiving foreign nations and actors as military threats. In all three cases, I find that
racial resentment is strongly associated with increased levels of support for the militaristic option. I argue
that these results provide one explanation for the American public’s willingness to support foreign
interventions and pay the costs of its foreign policy.
32
Public Opinion and Foreign Policy
While early scholarship describes an inattentive public with unstable attitudes (Lippmann 1946;
Almond 1950; Erskine 1963; Free and Cantril 1968; Simon 1974; Markus and Converse 1979), later
work, much of it influenced by the U.S. War in Vietnam (Aldrich et al. 2006), indicates that “Converse
may have seriously underestimated attitudinal stability” (Verba et al. 1967; Modigliani 1972; Bardes and
Oldendick 1978; Maggiotto and Wittkopf 1981; Bennett 1974; Hurwitz and Peffley 1987; Holsti 1992;
Wittkopf 1990). Scholars now largely agree that foreign policy beliefs are more structured and
consequential than skeptics believe, but while one school of thought argues that foreign policy opinion is
a “top-down” process driven by elites (Bullock 2011), another body of research advocates a “bottom-up”
process of attitude formation where “members of the public may lack information about the world around
them, but they do not lack principles” and “is perhaps better equipped for espousing judgments in foreign
affairs than many of our top-down models claim” (Kertzer and Zeitzoff 2017, 543).
Skepticism regarding the role of public influence in foreign policy is not without merit, however.
Foreign policy is just one of several major factors in Presidential evaluations (Edwards, Mitchell, and
Welch 1995). Elite opinion is much more strongly correlated with US policy than the opinions of the
general public (Gilens and Page 2014; Jacobs and Page 2005; Dexter, Bauer, and Pool 1963), especially
when the public has limited information (Bullock 2011). Even when the public expresses strong feelings,
there remain significant questions over whether the American public gets the foreign policy it votes for
(B. I. Page and Bouton 2006). Research examining major U.S. military interventions indicates that “the
public constrains, but does not set” American foreign policy (Sobel 2001, 5).
33
Despite these obstacles, public opinion regarding wars in Vietnam and Iraq had significant social
and political consequences (Bachman and Jennings 1975; Burstein and Freudenburg 1978; Modell and
Haggerty 1991; Malamud and Wozniak 2012; DeGrasse 2016). Public opinion about the treatment of
suspected terrorists during the Global War on Terror, launched in 2001, influenced domestic politics and
policies (Fawn and Hinnebusch 2006; Grose and Oppenheimer 2007; Baum and Groeling 2010). Nearly
two decades later, “terrorism” remained a top concern of American voters, consistently trailing only
economic issues in terms of priorities (Gramlich 2018). Given that public opinion on issues of foreign
policy, especially during elections, has been shown to have significant political consequences at the
domestic and international level, the question of how the public forms their beliefs seems worth exploring
further.
Race and Foreign Policy
Racial inequality has been a central feature of American politics and society since the
founding of the first colonies in the Americas (Devine 1989; Hirschfeld 1998; Bargh 1999;
Hutchings and Valentino 2004). Just as it is difficult to describe the impact of the U.S. on the
world, it is hard to overstate the influence of slavery as an economic system and White
supremacy as a social and political ideology not just in the nation’s founding, but in its
continuing development. While slavery and the slave trade strongly influenced U.S. foreign
policy from the Caribbean to Europe and Africa, in terms of projecting power beyond its borders,
the Indian Wars (1811-1924) loom large in U.S. history. Beyond issues dealing explicitly with
racial inequality, “many putatively nonracial issues…continue to be shaped by race-related
34
struggles” (King and Smith 2005, 89). Previous research indicates that policy preferences are
“race-coded” in the sense that racial prejudice is strongly associated with opposition to
affirmative action, welfare, and other social programs (Konitzer et al. 2018, 15). Rather than
receding over time, “Whites have increasingly brought racial considerations to bear” in their
attitudes regarding public policy and, just as importantly, their vote choices in the last seven
presidential elections (Enders and Scott 2019, 2). Previous studies of the role of race in foreign
policy in the U.S. have often taken the form of the examination of ethnic group attachment,
where citizens support foreign policies beneficial to the nations, regions, or counties from which
they emigrated to America (DeConde 1992; Goldberg 1990; Heywood 2015; Tatarczyk and
Wielhouwer 2019). By focusing on the public opinion of White Americans, this study is like
others who have studied public opinion about foreign policy (however, I am more explicit than
other scholars in recognizing that I study White attitudes). While the relationship between racial
identities and attitudes and support for U.S. foreign policy is certainly of interest for all
Americans, this study focuses on the connection racial resentment among White Americans
because of their historical position atop the U.S. social hierarchy.
For White Americans, the connection between domestic attitudes regarding race and
militarism has deep roots: international insecurities for the European powers and colonial
successor governments in Africa and the Americas have often been framed in termed of a social-
Darwinist racial slogans: e.g. “Manifest Destiny” and the “White Man’s Burden” (Horne 1999,
439; see also: Horsman 1981; Allan 2018; Krenn 1999). The colonial economic system was
“heavily racialized” (Horne 1999, 440) and some scholars attribute the origins of contemporary
White supremacy to the colonial powers’ justification for the African slave trade. Along with
slavery, another central element of U.S. early foreign policy was the colonization of territory
35
occupied by sovereign Native American tribal governments (Horne 1999; Krenn 1999). Once
occupying functionally 100 percent of the land of the United States, Native reservations are now
limited to approximately 2% of current U.S. territory. Recent studies have found that at least 87
percent of the pre-Colombian population of the Americas was lost to disease, famine, genocide,
and warfare (Liebmann et al. 2016).
The connections between race and American foreign policy also extend to Asia and the
Pacific (Horne 1999; Krenn 1999). U.S. wars in Asia “contributed significantly to this view of
Asian Americans and Asians as foreign enemies incapable of being assimilated into a U.S.
national system” (Lipsitz 2006, 71). U.S. rivalry with China and Japan, along with its
colonization of the Philippines, contributed to restrictive immigration and racial discrimination
for immigrants even if other hurdles were cleared (Espiritu 1992; Lowe 1996; Espiritu 2008;
Okihiro 2014; Horsman 1981). This dynamic suggests that “the rationalizations originally used
to justify conquest of Native Americans eventually applied to Mexicans and Filipinos” (Lipsitz
2006, 72; Horsman 1981). Fears of both American immigrants from Asia taking over businesses
and farms on the West Coast and the threat of the Japanese Empire in the Pacific worked together
to motivate racialized violence at home and abroad against Asians and Asian-Americans during
World War II (Guilford 2018). World War II has previously been cited as an example of war
leading to progress in terms of civil rights (Myrdal 1944; Klinkner 1999), although more recent
investigations analyzing White racial attitudes during this time period strongly question this
assertion (Kruse and Tuck 2012; White 2019).
The racialization of foreign policy in the contemporary era is perhaps most accessible for
Whites when it comes to the Global War on Terror (GWOT) following the attacks of September
11th, 2001. Americans are much more likely to label acts of violence acts of terrorism if they are
36
carried out by Muslims (Huff and Kertzer 2017). The perception that Muslims are “distinctly
misogynistic” may drive support for intervention due to “gendered Orientalism” among
Westerners (Terman 2017, 1). However, further examination has revealed that “concerns over the
incompatibility between Islam and American values and norms is largely a “cover story” to mask
beliefs in one’s inherent racial superiority and Muslims’ inherent inferiority” (Lajevardi and
Oskooii 2018, 28).
Furthermore, recent research has found that shifting electoral support from Barack
Obama to Donald Trump was driven by the perception among many Whites that their dominant
status, both domestically and internationally, was under threat (Mutz 2018). Americans broadly,
and Republicans more specifically, supported torture under the Bush Administration
(Blauwkamp, Rowling, and Pettit 2018), consistent with a broader pattern among the American
public which suggests they often respond to foreign threats with belligerence (Holsti 2004; B. I.
I. Page and Shapiro 1992; Davis and Silver 2004; Huddy et al. 2005). Additional research finds
“empirical support for the argument that Americans are considerably more supportive of
government abuse when it is directed at individuals who they perceive as threatening, including
if ‘the suspect is of Arab descent’ and if ‘the motive for the abuse is suspected terrorism’”
(Conrad et al. 2017, 989). Further experimental research shows that White Americans are more
likely to want to intervene in European humanitarian crises, despite higher costs and casualties
compared to intervening in African crises (Boettcher 2004). Whites are more supportive of
intervention across the board than Blacks, even in Africa, indicating a predisposition towards
intervention among Whites (Boettcher 2004). Survey research suggests that “this racial divide”
on national policy “cannot be explained in any simple or straightforward way by class” (Kinder
and Winter 2001, 449–50). Additional research has found “that negative stereotypes of salient
37
groups like those involving Latinos in the US and Middle Easterners in Canada and Britain are
powerful drivers of policy views in each country” and “a general ethnocentrism may exist in all
these places, but the specific national context is also relevant” (Konitzer et al. 2018, 15;
Hutchings and Valentino 2004).
From the Western “frontier” to the Caribbean to the Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa,
race has been an important factor in U.S. policy. While previous work has mostly examined this
feature in terms of political elites, the public also plays an important role in providing a
connection between domestic attitudes about race and U.S. foreign policy. This paper advances
the argument that White Americans project their racial views regarding domestic politics into the
international sphere, leading racially resentful individuals to be more likely to perceive actions
by non-White actors as threatening and more likely to support the use of military force in
response to these threats.
Research Design
To assess the racialization of foreign policy attitudes in American politics, I will analyze data on
racial resentment among White Americans and militarized foreign policy across several recent
U.S. presidential elections. The best source of data for this test is the American National Election
Survey (ANES) because it includes measures of both racial resentment, demographic variables,
veteran status, as well as a handful of foreign policy items that differ from year to year. While
this prevents true intertemporal analysis, the variation in items allows us to assess the association
(or lack thereof) between racial resentment and foreign policy opinion among the U.S. public
38
across a wide spectrum of issues. This study will focus on the ANES Cumulative Study, covering
1986-2016 along with the 2012 and 2016 ANES surveys.
The method of analysis is Multinomial Logistic Regression. This method has been
selected because it is designed to assess the relationship between a nominal dependent variable
with more than two outcomes and one or more independent variables (Starkweather and Moske
2011). Analysis of coefficients and p-values, as in other forms of logit regression, provide
meaningful insight. For example, I first estimate a multinomial logistic regression model and
report the coefficients and p-values of the variables of interest – the likelihood that the
correlation between my independent variable (racial resentment) and my dependent variables
(attitudes regarding foreign policy) is statistically significant.
The key independent variable in my analysis is racial resentment. While multiple
measures of out-group racial attitudes have been developed across the social sciences, racial
resentment is the prevailing lens through which contemporary out-group racism is measured in
American politics and has been shown to have a wide-ranging impact on attitudes and behavior.
Previous research indicates that racial resentment, or so-called “symbolic racism” captures racial
attitudes, especially of White Americans, better than more overt expressions of racial attitudes
(Virtanen and Huddy 1998; Valentino and Sears 2005; Reyna et al. 2006; Tesler 2016). Racial
resentment is measured using a four-item battery combined to create a composite scale,
measured from 0-1, with 1 being the most resentful. As discussed above, while many measures
of race and racism exist, the reliability and availability of data which includes both measures of
foreign policy attitudes and measures of identity limit this study significantly, mainly to the
ANES. Therefore, racial resentment is the main focus of this study.
39
Beginning in the 1970s, scholars observed that despite declining reports of overt racism
over time, many Whites remained opposed to policies that would reduce racial inequality
because they believe others to be undeserving of the same benefits which disproportionately
benefit them (McConahay and Hough 1976; Reyna et al. 2006). Typically measured using a four-
question battery (Henry and Sears 2002), racial resentment (or “symbolic racism”) has been
shown to significantly impact partisan identity (Valentino and Sears 2005), vote choice (Kinder
and Dale-Riddle 2011), and voter turnout (Winter 2008). While some argue that racial
resentment, especially within the framework of affirmative action, may be in fact about
constitutional principles among both white Democrats and Republicans (Gilens, Sniderman, and
Kuklinski 1998), recent research indicates that racial resentment was central to the opposition to
Barack Obama’s presidency and re-election (Tesler 2016).
While racial resentment asks Whites questions about their feelings regarding Black
Americans specifically, there is evidence that the feelings captured by this measure apply broadly
across races and ethnicities. For example, Muslim Americans have been “racialized” in similar
patterns in the American public (Lajevardi and Oskooii 2018). Rather than an attitude directed at
one specific minority, racial resentment applies broadly to “nonwhite” minority groups.
Therefore, I expect this general predisposition to influence attitudes regarding foreign policy
affecting Black people around the world, but also other nonwhite and racialized groups. The U.S.
public applies broad generalizations about foreign countries to the foreign policy attitudes, such
as assuming everyone in the Middle East is Muslim and/or Arab (Lajevardi and Oskooii 2018).
These generalizations are key to perceptions of threat for foreign interventions, as well as
assessments of incidents of terrorism (Avdan and Webb 2018). They also find a “rally around our
40
race” effect for Whites that does not have an analog among non-Whites” (Avdan and Webb 2018,
10).
This study focuses on racial resentment as the main explanatory variable, but I also
include several additional variables previously shown to impact foreign policy attitudes: income,
partisanship, ideology, gender, authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, veteran status,
education, political interest and attention, patriotism, and religiosity. A brief justification is
provided for each below, with specific coding and measurement for all variables is provided in
the statistical Appendix. Many Americans have authoritarian beliefs, and many others “become
susceptible to ‘authoritarian thinking’ when they perceive a grave threat to their safety”
(Hetherington and Suhay 2011, 536). Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) has also been shown
to increase the likelihood that individuals will support militaristic foreign policy (Pratto et al.
2000; 1994; Pratto, Stallworth, and Sidanius 1997; Alexander, Levin, and Henry 2005). SDO has
been shown to be more heavily distributed among men (Pratto, Stallworth, and Sidanius 1997)
and those of high-status groups, including those based on race and ethnicity (Sidanius 1993;
Pratto et al. 2000). Research on the impact of gender on foreign policy beliefs reveals that
“citizens prefer men’s leadership traits and characteristics, deem men more competent at
legislating around issues of national security and military crises, and contend that men are
superior to women at addressing the new obstacles generated by the events of September 11,
2001” and these beliefs sharply reduced support for female presidential candidates (Lawless
2004, 479). Moreover, “increased threat perceptions lead men but not women to be more likely
to support the use of torture” and “threat perceptions with respect to terrorism lead to greater
support for aggressive policies” (Lizotte 2017, 772).
41
The view that some groups are superior to others, and usually, that the in-group is
preferable to the outgroup, commonly known as “ethnocentrism”, has been shown to influence
foreign policy attitudes (Kam and Kinder 2007). However, it must be made clear that racial
resentment is distinct from the generalized attitude to think one’s own group is superior to others.
Racial resentment, rather, captures a specific White supremacist worldview where Whites have
paid their dues to work their way up and earn the position, while nonwhites are lazy, inferior, and
underserving of social benefits. For this reason, I include analysis replicating Kam and Kinder's
measure of ethnocentrism: a racial stereotyping index, where assessments of one’s own group are
compared to assessments of the out-group, in table A1 of the Appendix. Finally, in line with
previous research on public opinion, I include additional control variables for political interest
and attention, liberal-conservative ideology, partisanship, income, education level, and age.
The Wide-Ranging Impact of Racialization on Foreign Policy
The main dependent variables in the analysis are support for “militarized” foreign policy.
Militarization is a process which “involves an intensification of the labor and resources allocated to
military purposes, including the shaping of other institutions in synchrony with military goals” (Lutz
2002, 723). Furthermore, “[m]ilitarization is intimately connected not only to the obvious increase in the
size of armies and resurgence of militant nationalisms and militant fundamentalisms but also to the less
visible deformation of human potentials into the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and to
the shaping of national histories in ways that glorify and legitimate military action” (Lutz 2002, 723;
Bernstein 1999; Linenthal and Engelhardt 1996). In terms of the variables in my study, this means a)
supporting military intervention as a policy response, b) supporting increases in military spending, or c)
42
perceiving foreign actors as military threats. In all three cases, I expect racial resentment to be associated
with increased levels of support for the militaristic option.
To demonstrate the wide-ranging impact of racialization I break down the analysis into four
discrete policy areas. First, I explore public opinion among Whites regarding Iran and its
potential development of a nuclear weapon, which the United States strongly opposes on the
grounds of both nuclear nonproliferation and ideological and geopolitical opposition to the
government of Iran. I find that racial resentment is strongly associated with the perception that
Iran was secretly developing a weapon, opposition to diplomatic talks, and support for
preemptive military action, up to and including a military invasion. Second, I address the so-
called “rise of China” and how racialization impacts the perception that a more powerful and
economically robust China is an economic threat, a military threat, or both. Third, while the
connections between Islamophobia and the Global War on Terror have been well-studied in the
literature, I address the impact of racial resentment on support for torture of suspected terrorists
and support for large-scale military action against the so-called “Islamic State” in Syria and Iraq.
Fourth and finally, I document the connection between racial resentment and support for the
militarization of U.S. foreign and domestic policy, high levels of military spending, support for
military intervention, and the perception that America’s position in the world is threatened.
The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed by Barack Obama and ratified
by the U.S. Senate, was a significant issue in the 2012 Presidential election. Negotiations with
the Iranian regime aimed at curtailing its potential development of a nuclear weapon has long
been a foreign policy priority of the United States, but the issue rose to public prominence
following the announcement that the U.S. would engage in official negotiations with Iran and the
P5+1 – the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (China, France, Russia,
43
the United Kingdom, and the United States), plus Germany. Many Americans disagreed with
opening negotiations because they wanted a tougher line on Iran, as they have since the 1979
Revolution. However, Barack Obama had campaigned on rapprochement with the Iranian regime
and Secretary of State John Kerry made it one of his signature issues.
On the 2012 ANES, respondents were asked a series of five questions about the Iranian
regime’s intentions regarding nuclear weapons and how the US should respond. Respondents are
asked for their support of the following statements: 1) “Iran is developing a nuclear weapon”; 2)
“US should engage in direct diplomacy with Iran”; 3) “US should enact diplomatic sanctions on
Iran”; 4) “US should bomb Iranian nuclear sites”; and, 5) “US should invade Iran”. The items
present a continuum of responses to Iranian efforts, from doing nothing, to invading the country,
with the standard range of options in between. Even though “militarization” is a fairly simple
concept, the items asked on the 2012 ANES should provide face validity to my hypothesis given
that the items are discrete and simple in their formulation, and respondents with even a casual
knowledge of global affairs can identify an aggressive military operation from diplomatic talks.
Furthermore, rather than vignettes or hypothetical scenarios, respondents are confronted with
real-world, realistic scenarios at a time when their opinions and willingness to vote based on
them would have real consequences.
Scholars, policy planners, and economists have been keenly interested in the potential
military and economic power of China following the 1949 Communist Party revolution. This
perception is driven primarily by China’s impact on the U.S. and global economy in the 21st
Century, but it harkens back to uncomfortably familiar racist tropes in the U.S. regarding fears of
non-White, non-Western peoples and nations in and across the Pacific Ocean. While the threat
posed by China is often framed as a relatively contemporary one, U.S. foreign policy concerns
44
about China date back to the 1840’s Opium Wars and the U.S. involvement in the “opening” of
China to world trade. Since then, conflict has emerged between the two superpowers during the
revolution, where the U.S. support the losing Nationalist cause led by Chiang Kai-shek, and later,
the independence of Taiwan where Chiang initially found exile. During the Cold War, China was
perceived as either a close ally of or puppet of the Soviet Union, and Nixon especially saw the
Chinese government in especially racist terms. Combined with U.S. military intervention in
Vietnam and Korea (among many others), China has long been a potential or actual adversary to
U.S. foreign policy. More recently, China’s economic growth and military assertiveness in its
region and beyond are leading features of hearings on Capitol Hill regarding foreign policy,
trade, and national security. Furthermore, the Trump Administration’s 2017 National Security
Strategy (White House 2017) emphasizes a “return to great power competition” with China
which was framed by the Secretary of State as a “fight with a really different civilization”
(Gehrke 2019). To assess how racialization impacts White Americans’ views of China, on the
2012, respondents are asked 1) whether they perceive China as an economic threat to the United
States and 2) if they perceive China as a military threat to the United States. To address the
broader claim of militarization, on both surveys I also measure the impact of racial resentment on
influencing opinion in terms of the specific type of threat that China poses: economic or military.
On the 2016 ANES, respondents are asked only the question about China’s potential as a military
threat.
Third, I analyze the impact of racial resentment on support for the Global War on Terror,
as conceived under the George W. Bush Administration in reaction to the attack on the World
Trade Center in September of 2001. Specifically, I assess the impact of racial resentment on
support for the torture of suspected terrorists and the perception of threat from terrorism. On the
45
2012 survey, respondents are asked a series of questions related to the Department of Homeland
Security and how the war has impacted the daily lives of Americans. When assessing the 2016
ANES, I focus on the threat of ISIS (the so-called “Islamic State”) and international terrorism,
given the issue’s prominence in the 2016 election. The dependent variable I focus on here is
whether racial resentment is associated with support for a more aggressive approach, including
“boots on the ground” in Iraq and Syria, to combat ISIS. Respondents are also asked about their
support for refugees fleeing both ISIS and the Syrian Civil War, and I examine the role of
racialization regarding what would become a key factor in Donald Trump’s “Muslim Ban” in
early 2017.
Finally, when examining the ANES cumulative study, I am able to focus on overall
feelings on US foreign policy and militarism more generally and fundamentally. These items also
reduce the potential impact of interest and attention, since rather than dealing with specific and
complex issues, they ask respondents about value-based prepositions. In this section, I examine
the four following dependent variables from the cumulative survey: 1) support for foreign aid, 2)
levels of defense spending, 3) isolationism/engagement, and 4) use of military force to solve
problems.
Hypotheses: Racial attitudes have long-standing historical connections to U.S. foreign policy.
However, existing studies tell us little about how racial resentment influences foreign policy
attitudes. In addition, while racialization has been shown to strongly impact domestic policy
attitudes current studies have not yet tested to see whether it extends to issues in the foreign
policy realm. Therefore, this study is designed to analyze the interaction between racial
resentment and militarism among the U.S. public. My hypotheses are:
46
H1: Use of Force Hypothesis: High levels of racial resentment will be associated with
willingness to use military force. This may also be associated with a corresponding lack of
support for diplomatic and/or economic options
H2: Threat Perception Hypothesis: High levels of racial resentment will be associated with the
perception of foreign countries and actors as military and/or economic threats
H3: Economic Investment Hypothesis: High levels of racial resentment will be associated with
spending on, and support for, the U.S. military. This may also include a corresponding lack of
support for diplomatic and/or economic spending on national security such as foreign aid
In order to assess these hypotheses, I perform three quantitative studies – each with the
same independent variable (racial resentment) across three iterations of the ANES. While the
independent variable remains constant across studies, the variation across surveys in dependent
variables available regarding foreign policy allows me to better demonstrate the consistent but
complex relationship between racism and foreign policy among White Americans.
Study 1 focuses on the 2012 ANES, which includes dependent variables of interest
regarding public opinion on Iranian nuclear development, the Global War on Terror, and the
military and economic impact of China. Study 2 uses the 2016 ANES which allows for further
analysis which extends to public opinion on the so-called “Islamic State”, whether the U.S.
should accept refugees from the Syrian Civil War. In addition, Study 2 will look at two of the
same items as Study 1 – the GWOT and the perception of China as a military power. This
provides a robustness check, but furthermore, helps advance the argument that the connection
between race and foreign policy is temporally persistent. Study 3 turns to the ANES Cumulative
survey, which covers 1986-2016. Here, I analyze the connection between racism and more
47
universal attitudes pertaining to U.S. foreign policy: defense spending levels, foreign aid,
isolationism, feelings about the military, and whether the U.S. should use military force to solve
problems in the world.
Results and Findings
Across all three studies, I find strong support for all three hypotheses, and overall support for the
theory that racial resentment and militarism are strongly associated among White Americans. I
will report the relationship between my hypotheses and the results in each Study separately
before turning to broader takeaways in the following section.
48
Study 1: 2012 ANES
Study 1 analyzes the relationship between racial resentment and U.S. militarism among
Whites using the 2012 ANES in three policy areas: Iranian nuclear development, China’s global
power, and the war on terror. I will discuss each in order with corresponding tables and figures.
49
Table 4: Racialization of Foreign Policy-
Iran (2012)
Table 4 presents the results for regression analysis of White public opinion on Iranian nuclear
development across five variables, as discussed above. Racial resentment is strongly correlated
with the perception that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon, despite signing international
agreements to the contrary (p<0.05). Racial resentment does not have a strong relationship with
respondents’ willingness to engage in diplomacy, but racial resentment is strongly correlated with
respondents’ support for economic sanctions (p<0.01). Perhaps most alarmingly, racial
resentment among White Americans is strongly associated (p<0.001) with support for bombing
sites in Iran suspected of being involved in nuclear development and even for a full U.S. military
invasion of Iran. Figure 4 visually displays postestimation results from the regression equations
above. Overall, results from Table 4 provide strong support for my argument that racial
resentment is strongly associated with U.S. militarism.
Turning to Table 5 below, results are presented analyzing the relationship between racial
resentment and the so-called “Rise of China” in international politics. Respondents were asked
50
Figure 4: Racialization of Public Opinion on Iran
whether they perceived China as 1) a military threat and 2) an economic threat to the United
States.
Results from Table 5 provide strong support for the hypothesis that racial resentment is
strongly associated with the perception of “foreign: countries as threatening. White respondents
were significantly more likely to believe that China poses a military threat (p<0.001) and an
51
Table 5: Racialization of Foreign Policy -
China (2012)
economic threat (p<0.001) to the United States in 2012. Figures 5 and 6 present postestimation
results from Table 5 for ease of interpretation.
52
Figure 5: China as Economic Threat (2012)
Figure 6: China as Military Threat (2012)
Table 6 displays results for analysis which teats the hypothesis that racial resentment is
strongly associated with White opinion regarding the GWOT. White Americans who are racially
resentful are also much more likely to support the use of torture against suspected terrorists
(p<0.001). Racial resentment is also strongly associated with the belief among Whites that a
major terror attack is likely in the next year (p<0.001) – indicating again the perception of threat
associated with racial resentment in foreign policy. However, results were not significant when
examining attitudes on either the overall effectiveness of the GWOT or the war in Afghanistan.
Figure 7 visually displays postestimation results for Table 6. Again, I find strong support
for the hypothesis that racial resentment is a significant factor in U.S. public opinion on foreign
policy. Most notably, the relationship with support for torture in the GWOT is particularly strong.
53
Table 6: Racialization of Foreign Policy - GWOT
(2012)
Overall, Study 1 provides strong support for the argument that for White Americans,
racial resentment has a strong relationship with approving of U.S. militarism – in this case
against Iran, China, and in the GWOT.
Study 2: 2016 ANES
Study 2 Turns to the 2016 ANES to analyze the connection between White out-group
attitudes (measured as racial resentment) and support for militaristic foreign policy. First, Table 7
displays the results when analyzing three dependent variables related to the Global War on
Terror. Model 1 analyzes the belief that a major terror attack is likely in the next year, Model 2
54
Figure 7: Global War on Terror (2012)
asks respondents whether they worry about a major attack, regardless of whether or not an attack
is likely, and Model 3 analyzes support for torture of suspected terrorists.
Results from Table 7 provides strong support for my hypotheses. As shown in Model 1,
respondents who score highly on the racial resentment battery were significantly more likely to
believe that a terror attack was likely in the next year (p<0.05). This supports findings in Study 1
(Table 3, Model 4). Model 2 shows that Whites that racial resentment was also strongly
associated with the worry that there would be a major terror attack in the U.S. (p<0.001). Closing
55
Table 7: Racialization of Foreign Policy -
GWOT (2016)
out results from Table 7, as in the results from Study 1 focusing on 2012 (Table 6, Model 1),
racial resentment was strongly associated with support for U.S. Whites in 2016.
Table 8 displays the final set of results for Study 2. Model 1 addresses public opinion
regarding whether “boots on the ground” – meaning U.S. combat troops – should be sent to Iraq
and/or Syria to combat the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Model 2 turns to the
question of whether the U.S. should accept refugees from the Syrian Civil War. Lastly, Model 3
returns to the question of whether China poses a military threat to the U.S. that was also asked in
Study 1, Table 5, Model 1. Again, the results from Table 8 provide strong support for the
hypothesis that racial resentment is strongly associated with support for U.S. militarism among
U.S. Whites.
56
White Americans who scored highly on the racial resentment battery were significantly more
likely to oppose admitting Syrian refugees (p<0.001), which provides additional support to
previous research linking racial attitudes to lack of support for Muslim refugees. Racial
resentment was also strongly correlated with the perception that China is a military threat to the
U.S. for Whites in 2016 (p<0.001). Racial resentment, however, did not have a significant
relationship with support for sending U.S. troops to fight ISIS. Figures 8, 9, and 10 below
provide visual interpretations of postestimation results from analysis in Table 8.
57
Table 8: Racialization of Foreign Policy - ISIS/Syria
(2016)
58
Figure 8: Public Opinion on ISIS (2016)
59
Figure 9: Public Opinion on Syrian Refugees (2016)
60
Figure 10: China as Military Threat (2016)
Study 3: ANES Cumulative Survey (1986-2016)
The racial resentment battery was asked beginning with the 1986 ANES and included
nearly every year since. Including this data set in the analysis allows me to explore several
additional questions regarding the connection between racism and militarism. For example,
previous literature has suggested that the election of Barack Obama led to the racialization of
nearly every domestic policy in the U.S. (Tesler 2016) and the election of Donald Trump may
have continued this trend (Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck 2018). One limitation of this data set,
however, is that it lacks the robust array of control variables included on each survey. Control
variables for age, income, education, partisanship, political ideology, isolationism, and gender
match closely the items on the 2012 and 2016 surveys, used in Study 1 and Study 2 respectively.
However, only political interest (not attention) is available in the Cumulative survey. The
Cumulative survey also lacks measures for religious identity – for which I have substituted
church attendance – and patriotism, for which I could not identify a reliable substitute. Finally,
measures for egalitarianism and authoritarianism were also absent from the Cumulative survey in
frequencies that allowed for robust analysis. Overall, while the cumulative survey used in Survey
3 offers insight over a long period of time, it is correspondingly limited in the depth of questions
in the data set, despite including most of the major control variables included in Study 1 and
Study 2. In many ways, the three data sets are similar enough to allow for comparison, but
unique enough to offer something important to each study. Together, the three data sets
complement each other in providing support for my hypotheses regarding the connection
between racism and militarism among the U.S. public.
Study 3 analyzes four regression models differing only in the dependent variable
analyzed. Model 1 analyzes the ideology of isolationism – that the U.S. should stay out of the
61
rest of the world’s business. Model 2 examines opinion on the military budget – should it be
raised or lowered? Model 3 looks at a question asked in just one survey but directly addresses the
central claim of the article – does the respondent support using military force to solve problems
in the world? Model 4 assesses the connection between racial resentment and feelings about the
military.
62
Table 9: Racialization of Foreign Policy - Cumulative Survey (1986-2016)
Results from Models 1-4 are displayed in Table 9. These results provide strong support
for my hypotheses. Racial resentment is strongly correlated (p<0.001) with the belief that the
U.S. would be better off if it kept itself out of global affairs (the dependent variable of
isolationism as shown in Model # of Table #). While this belief is rooted in American tradition
dating back to Washington’s farewell address, it generally involves putting American interests
above those of the rest of the world – a rejection of internationalism. Respondents with lower
education and income levels, younger respondents, and those who went to church less often were
also more likely to support isolationism (p<0.001).
This result from Study 3 presents an interesting comparison considering the evidence
from Study 1 and Study 2 that racial resentment is strongly correlated with support for military
spending and intervention in Iran, China, and the Middle East. While further analysis is
necessary to examine this relationship, this pattern is consistent with the “America First” foreign
policy offered by President Donald Trump. This paradigm views a strong military as necessary to
a) protect American sovereignty, b) establish deterrence against other major powers, and c) to
provide leverage to advance American interests when challenged by less powerful countries or
international institutions like the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) which threaten American sovereignty. While not opposed to American military power
per se, many isolationists resent the use of American power in service of these institutions or
values such as global human rights and would prefer the U.S. focus on its own national interest.
Turning to Model 2, racial resentment is strongly and positively correlated with support
for increasing military spending (p<0.001). This result is not only consistent with the results
discussed in Model 1 above, but also mirrors the analysis of this dependent variable in Study 1
and Study 2. The U.S. military budget in 2016 was $610 trillion – far outpacing its competitors
63
and representing nearly a third of global military spending (SIPRI 2018). Despite this advantage,
which has persisted since the onset of the Cold War, racially resentful Americans support using
even more revenue on the military. The results from Model 3 provide further support for my
hypothesis: racial resentment is strongly correlated with support for the belief that the U.S.
should use military force to solve problems in the world (p<0.001). Model 4 supports analysis
above, finding that racial resentment is strongly correlated with positive feelings about the
military (p<0.001). Across Models 1-4, lower levels of education are strongly correlated with
support for the militaristic option among White Americans from 1986-2016. While the remaining
control variables achieved significance in some models, analysis did not establish a consistent
pattern.
Table 10 presents analysis of respondents’ support for U.S. foreign aid. They were given
three options for the item – increase, decrease, or stay the same. The baseline category for
analysis, therefore, was the option to “stay the same” while predictions are generated for the
relative risk of falling in one of the other two categories – increasing or decreasing U.S. foreign
aid. The results provide clear support for the hypothesis, indicating that racially resentful
respondents were significantly less likely to support increasing aid (p<0.001) and also much
more likely to support cutting foreign aid (p<0.01). Figure 11 presents these results in visual
form – showing that those who score low on the racial resentment scale are much more likely to
support increasing aid or keeping it the same, while respondents reporting high levels of racial
resentment were just as likely to support cuts as to support increases in U.S. foreign aid. Figure
11 displays the postestimation results displayed visually.
64
65
Table 10: Public Opinion on Foreign Aid - ANES
Cumulative Survey (1986-2016)
Overall, the results from Study 3 provide additional evidence for my hypotheses as well
as further support for the findings from Studies 1 and 2. Racial resentment is strongly correlated
with support for putting U.S. interests and sovereignty above internationalism, increasing the
defense budget, supporting the use of military force by the U.S. to solve problems in the world,
and cutting foreign aid. While each result is notable on its own, taken together they show a clear
pattern establishing the strong connection between high levels of racial resentment and support
for militaristic foreign policy among White Americans from 1986-2016.
Racial Resentment and the Use of Military Force
I find strong support for the Use of Force Hypothesis, which expected that high levels of
racial resentment are associated with higher levels of support for policies that rely on military
66
Figure 11: Public Opinion on Foreign Aid (ANES Cumulative)
force. Analysis supports this conclusion overall, but the results are particularly illustrative when
examining White attitudes regarding Iran. Data from the 2012 ANES indicates that higher levels
of racial resentment are strongly correlated with support for the military options: bombing
Iranian installations where nuclear weapons development may be occurring and a full-blown
invasion of Iran using U.S. ground troops. Racial resentment is also strongly correlated with the
belief that the Iranian regime is developing a nuclear weapon, despite international consensus to
the contrary. Rejection of diplomatic negotiations was also strongly correlated with racial
resentment among Whites. However, somewhat contrary to expectations, racial resentment was
also associated with a desire to impose economic sanctions on the Iranian regime. These policy
questions were not asked as either-or or trade-offs between policies, which leaves open the
possibility that respondents are willing to engage in sanctions in lieu of military intervention
while still preferring the latter to the former. Racial resentment has the strongest impact
(p<0.001, Table 4, Model 4) on the willingness to bomb Iranian nuclear sites from the air. While
not necessarily as belligerent as a full-blown invasion, airstrikes are seen by politicians and the
public as the lowest-risk option in terms of American lives while presenting a much greater risk
to Iranian military personnel and/or civilians.
Dehumanization of enemies has long been a central theme to conflict, but in particular the
association of the enemy with either vermin to be exterminated using technology like airpower is
brought to mind in this scenario. In contrast, an invasion by U.S. troops risks thousands of
American casualties. It may be the case that foreign lives are seen as expendable, while
American lives sacrosanct. In addition, the impersonality and distance from the battlefield
involved in much modern air-to-ground combat creates both physical and emotional distance
between combatants and their targets which may increase the risk of civilian casualties. The
67
tradeoff between exposing U.S. servicemembers to risk and avoiding civilian casualties is
somewhat evident from this analysis, given that those most prone to racialized dehumanization
prefer the policy option at one extreme of that tradeoff.
Turning to the ANES cumulative survey (1986-2016) I also find that racial resentment is
highly correlated with the willingness to use military force to solve problems in the world.
Furthermore, analysis of the 2016 ANES reveals a strong connection between racial resentment
and the willingness to deploy U.S. troops to combat the so-called “Islamic State” in Syria and
Iraq. Overall, these results indicate strong support for the Use of Force Hypothesis: racial
resentment is strongly correlated with public support for military options in foreign policy
among Whites. Finally, my findings support and build on previous research which has found a
strong connection between support for the torture of suspected terrorists on both the 2012 and
2016 ANES. However, this is the first study to note the direct connection between belief in
racialized hierarchy, i.e. racial resentment, and support for torture in the Global War on Terror.
68
Racial Resentment and Perception of Threat
I also find strong support for H2: Threat Perception Hypothesis, but with some caveats. I
previously noted that racial resentment was strongly correlated with the perception that Iran is
developing a nuclear weapon on the 2012 ANES. Racial resentment is also highly correlated
with rejecting refugees from Syria from settling in the U.S., which previous research suggests
flows from the perception that Arabs and Muslims are terrorists, and that Islam and the cultures
of the Middle East are incompatible with Western values and institutions. Furthermore, racial
resentment is strongly correlated with describing a high risk of a major terrorist attack on the
U.S. during both the 2012 and 2016 ANES. Interestingly, on the 2016 survey respondents were
asked two separate items: 1) whether they worried about an attack and 2) whether at attack was
likely. Perhaps most tellingly, racial resentment was strongly correlated with worrying about a
major terrorist attack occurring in the U.S. within the next year but did not increase respondents’
estimation of its likelihood. Anxiety about threats from racialized “others” is a central feature of
the essentialist and hierarchical attitudes undergirding contemporary White supremacy.
On both the 2012 and 2016 ANES, racial resentment was strongly correlated with the
perception that China is a military threat to the United States. However, the results are
complicated slightly by analysis of the 2012 ANES indicating that racially resentful White
Americans perceive China as a stronger economic threat than a military one. However, this
makes sense for a number of reasons. First, racial resentment is most often reported by and
associated with the so-called “White Working Class”, which is the cohort most likely to blame
foreign companies and immigrants for what they see as a decline in U.S. standing. Furthermore,
there is no indication that the perception of China as an economic threat would make respondents
69
any less likely to prefer applying a military solution to the problem. Rather, it seems just as likely
that racially resentful respondents perceive China as a threat to U.S. prosperity because of its
economic strength, and therefore believe military conflict is likely or preferable in order to
maintain U.S. economic primacy.
70
Racial Resentment and Support for the Military
I also find strong support for my third and final hypothesis, the Economic Investment
Hypothesis, that racial resentment will lead to stronger support for military spending and more
positive feelings toward the U.S. military and its actions. Racial resentment was strongly
correlated with the perception among White Americans that the country was losing ground on the
international stage from 1986-2016. The perception of China as a growing threat on the 2012 and
2016 surveys is consistent with this long-term belief among the racially resentful. The idea that
the U.S. is losing ground overall implies that it is losing ground to someone, and in the
contemporary era, the U.S. biggest competitor on the world stage is China (Ikenberry 1988;
Kang 2007). Accordingly, I find that racial resentment is strongly associated with support for
U.S. conduct in both Iraq and Vietnam, increased spending on the military, and warm feelings
toward the U.S. military overall. Racial resentment seems to increase support both the troops and
the war, leading individuals to want more of both, therefore reducing support for dovish parties,
politicians, and policies and increasing support for hawkish policies and elites.
The one notable exception to this pattern is that in 2012 survey, racially resentful Whites
report negative evaluations for the conduct of the Global War on Terror. However, given the
overwhelming support for both torture and military invasions to combat ISIS, it seems highly
likely that they would support a more aggressive and militaristic approach to the conflict as
championed by President Donald Trump during the 2016 election. Opposition to the conduct of
the GWOT, from this point of view, may indicate that this sense of dissatisfaction results from
the relatively de-militarized approach to the conflict articulated by Barack Obama.
71
Indeed, former President Obama, along with many of his fellow Democrats, have
seemingly successfully been painted by the GOP as weak on terrorism. This is part of the broader
perception among the U.S. public that Republicans are the stronger party when it comes to
National Security. Analysis of the ANES cumulative survey indicates that racially resentful
Whites trust the GOP much more than the Democrats to avoid a major war, a strong indicator of
trust in the party. Furthermore, racial resentment is a strong correlate of isolationist attitudes
among the White Americans. Combined with previous analysis of threat perception and
militaristic policy, a pattern begins to emerge that is consistent with much of the previous
research on race and the military. Racially resentful Whites would like to spend a lot on the
military so that it can be used to defend U.S. national interests. While on its face this worldview
is largely consistent with a conservative or “realist” view of foreign policy common among the
GOP and many conservative Americans, it becomes deeply problematic given that racial
resentment also increases the perception of threat and willingness to use force against non-White
nations and people. While the data available limit this study to the perception of potential threats
to U.S. foreign policy priorities, future analysis regarding how racial resentment impacts the
perception of U.S. allies from the United Kingdom to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, along with
erstwhile colonies such as the Philippines and current territories and protectorates in the
Caribbean and Pacific. In terms of the cases analyzed here, White Americans seem in general to
respond belligerently to foreign actors and actions, but the racially resentful are more likely to do
so overall, and especially so when the perceived threat is racialized.
This is consistent with my findings regarding the war on terror: racially resentful Whites
are likely to perceive threats from non-White foreigners, and then more likely to want to use the
military to react to those threats, even while controlling for partisanship, liberal-conservative
72
ideology, and authoritarian beliefs. Furthermore, these individuals seem to prefer military options
which transfer risks from U.S. servicemembers and civilians to racialized minorities across the
world. This is perhaps best exemplified by the finding from the ANES cumulative survey that
racially resentful Whites were much more likely to agree with rapprochement with the USSR.
This finding is intriguing considering the return to prominence of Russia in the 2016 election.
Contrasted with the perception that both Iran and China represent military threats, the bias of
racial attitudes when it comes to foreign policy is all the more evident. As previously noted,
racial resentment is a strong predictor of support for torture and increased militarism in the
GWOT, and correspondingly predicts negative evaluations of the GWOT as pursued by Barack
Obama.
73
Discussion
Being an American, both as defined via political institutions (Harris 1993) and the social
construction of identity and belonging in society (Baldwin 1998), has always been conditional on
being White (Lipsitz 2006). Military service often works as a vector for both citizenship and
Whiteness (Mazumder 2017). For those not in the active military, being “for the war” is often
framed as being patriotic, and vice-versa (Brewer 2009). Rather than an episodic overreaction to
the attacks on 9/11, the racialization of issues among the American public permeates not only
domestic policy, immigration, and counterterrorism, but attitudes regarding military intervention
against Iran, China, and Israel, as well as support for the military and defense spending more
generally. In addition to being based in patriotism, partisanship, and prejudice, this paper argues
that the American public’s support for militarism is also influenced by their racial beliefs,
identities, and attitudes.
Analysis of the ANES from 2012, 2016, and the 1986-2016 cumulative study paints a
clear picture of the connection between racial resentment among the U.S. public and support for
militaristic foreign policy among White Americans. Racially resentful Whites are much more
likely to a) prefer military policies to diplomatic or economic ones, b) perceive non-White
foreign countries as especially threatening on the international stage, and c) more likely to
support the U.S. military and spending to enhance it. However, racially resentful Whites are
skeptical of policies and politicians that are perceived to be more dovish or unpatriotic. In the
absence of other information regarding foreign policy, or in perhaps in spite of it, many White
Americans rely on racial resentment as a heuristic to inform their views and beliefs. The
problematic past and present of the U.S. regarding race and racial attitudes are not just domestic
74
issues but are exported as far and as wide as U.S. military power is projected. While this may not
come as much of a surprise to many historians and scholars of U.S. foreign policy, this study
helps reveal the specific mechanisms linking domestic racial hierarchy to U.S. militarism abroad,
finding the public to play a key role.
Large and influential segments of both American voters and political elites espouse racist
sentiments regarding people at home and abroad. The racialization of U.S. opinion regarding
domestic policies has only become more entrenched after the elections of Barack Obama and
Donald Trump (Tesler 2012; 2016; Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck 2018; Mutz 2018; Jardina 2019;
Berry, Ebner, and Cornelius 2019). At the same time, U.S. foreign policy has taken up a bigger
part of the budget and has trended toward militarization, slowly at first and then spiking after the
end of World War II, despite predictions the end of the Cold War would produce an era of peace
and prosperity for America and the world. The literature often describes a “liberal world order”
led by the United States and institutions like the United Nations, World Bank, and NATO. This
study advances the argument that the conduct of U.S. foreign policy has also been strongly
influenced by the illiberal principles of White supremacy. While on one hand, American values
of economic and political freedom have guided its actions. On the other hand, just as in its
domestic policies, these liberal principles have often seemed hypocritical in the face of how they
are applied to non-Whites. This racialized worldview among the U.S. public and its elites has
helped to drive the insecurity at the heart of support for defense spending, military interventions,
and the militarization of the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.
75
Essay 3: Voting for Empire: The Racial Foundations of White Americans’ Support for U.S.
Military Policy
Introduction
The United States maintains one of the strongest militaries in history, and along with its economic
power, has leveraged this strength to raise itself from struggling British colony in 1776 to one of the
largest and most powerful military and economic empires in history (Bacevich 2004). While U.S. empire
often hides in plain sight (Immerwahr 2019), the U.S. government’s failed response to Hurricane Maria in
Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands temporarily raised public awareness to the presence of
“Territories” which the U.S. governs but that lack political representation in Congress – in other words,
colonies (Rodríguez-Díaz 2018; Weiss and Setser 2019).
Furthermore, the United States is not too far removed from the presidencies of William McKinley
and Teddy Roosevelt, who proudly advocated for American Empire and using “gunboat diplomacy” to
annex territory across the Caribbean and Pacific. However, since World Wars I and II, international norms
have shifted against not just terms like “empire” and “imperialism” but against the underlying behavior of
nations – largely with the help of liberal international institutions like the United Nations originally
designed and led by the United States (Acheson 1970). As one of the two major powers who survived the
wars relatively intact, the U.S., however, had a major role in shaping the postwar order (Acheson 1970).
This role continued through the Cold War with the U.S.S.R. (Kissinger and Billington 2001). The end of
the Cold War ushered in a period of U.S. dominance of world affairs that some scholars describe as
“hegemony” (Cox 2001) and others, more critical of the U.S., describe as imperialism.
76
While many no longer refer to the U.S. system of power and governance outside its borders as an
“empire”, the U.S. maintains at least 909 military bases in 46 countries and territories (Lutz 2009) from
which the U.S. military operated in at least eighty countries in 2017 (Turse 2017). The United States also
controls and governs directly over five non-state territories (Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands,
American Samoa, and the Northern Marianas Islands) made up of over 4 million U.S. citizens who lack
full representation in Congress and the right to vote for U.S. president. In addition, the U.S. is responsible
for full control of defense and military operations for the nations of Palau and the Federated States of
Micronesia – another 150,000 people. Figures 12 and 13 display this U.S. geopolitical reach. Figure 12
displays a map of U.S. non-state territories. Figure 13 shows the presence of U.S. military bases around
the world, and shows that these bases are located extensively in Asia, Africa, the Middle East; but also
extend to South and Latin America. These maps show that the extent of U.S. “empire” is vast, and much
of it extends to areas of the world in which non-White minority groups in the United States have ancestry.
Thus, the history of imperialism may suggest the racialization of White Americans’ attitudes toward U.S.
military intervention. This study seeks to grapple with this complex and seemingly contradictory state of
the world: the United States as a liberal democracy founded on freedom and individual rights, yet where
its White citizens democratically approve of de facto empire.
77
Figure 12: Current U.S. non-state Territories
Source: (King 2020)
78
Figure 13: U.S. Military Bases in 2018 Source: Costs of War Project,
Brown University (Brown University 2020)
While the legislative (Ray 1981) and judicial branches (Franck 1991) play an important role,
literature across the social sciences has recognized that, because of both Constitutional prerogatives and
military necessity, the politics and the conduct of foreign policy is dominated by the President (Canes-
Wrone, Howell, and Lewis 2008; Wildavksy 1966). Because the U.S. President is democratically elected,
this means that public opinion regarding presidential performance plays a central role in the politics of
foreign policy. While the public may lack information or attention to the subject, under conditions of
uncertainty, individual Americans rely on heuristics that provide structure for their beliefs.
This study examines the degree to which racial identity acts as a heuristic for Whites in the U.S.
when they form opinion about U.S. foreign policy. Previous studies of the role of race in foreign policy in
the U.S. have often taken the form of the examination of citizen support for foreign policies beneficial to
the nations or countries from which they emigrated to America (DeConde 1992; Goldberg 1990;
Heywood 2015; Tatarczyk and Wielhouwer 2019). This study focuses on racial identity among White
Americans because of their historical position atop the U.S. social hierarchy.
In addition, this study is an important contribution because it theorizes that White Americans’
attitudes toward foreign policy, military intervention, and bombing other countries are predicted by white
identity, whites’ perceptions of discrimination, and other racial attitudes. In short, the strength of white
racial identity – and other White Americans’ attitudes about their racial position in society is associated
with many pro-militarization attitudes. This analysis of Whites’ attitudes toward their own in-group and
attitudes toward military intervention is novel and raises a number of troubling normative theoretical
issues.
79
This “empire” or imperialism referenced above may translate to a connection between White
racial attitudes and attitudes toward military policy. Given the historically racialized components of
American military intervention going back to the country’s origin and continuing to the present with U.S.
intervention in much of the non-European world, we may expect that White Americans’ attitudes will be
associated with support for military intervention.
Scholars have described “two great hypocrisies” at the heart of the American political project:
slavery and an “all but genocidal” policy towards Native Americans (Duncan 2014). While there are
many factors at play, when looking for explanations this study follows in the tradition of those have
identified race as the central organizing feature of American politics (Hutchings and Valentino 2004; Omi
and Winant 2014). It goes beyond and argues that race is also a central organizing feature of attitudes
toward U.S. foreign policy. While other studies have focused on the role that out-group attitudes such as
racism (Ebner, Ch.2 of this dissertation) and ethnocentrism (Kam and Kinder 2007) play in U.S. public
support for militarism, there has been no examination of the role of in-group attitudes about one’s racial
group. Therefore, this study focuses on the role that Whiteness plays in the American public’s willingness
to support large military budgets and destructive military interventions abroad.
Using the 2012 American National Election Survey, this study advances the argument that
in-group racial attitudes play a major role in U.S. public opinion on foreign policy for White
Americans. Motivated in part by the racialization of the Presidency of Barack Obama and the
subsequent reactionary movement personified by Donald Trump, scholars of American politics
have occasionally turned to studies of racial identity among White Americans (Jardina 2019;
Berry, Ebner, and Cornelius 2019) While this scholarship has yielded important findings
80
regarding domestic attitudes, significant questions remain about role of Whiteness in American
politics when it comes to foreign policy (Mutz 2018). Given no scholarship (other than Mutz
2018) looks at foreign policy attitudes and White Americans’ attitudes about their in-group
identity, this essay’s research is novel. It analyzes the impact of three measures of White in-
group racial attitudes - linked fate, White identity, and perceived discrimination - on support for
U.S. militarism in the form of foreign interventions and military spending.
The remainder of this chapter is broken down into four additional sections. First, I give a
background of the history of U.S. foreign policy as it relates to White in-group attitudes; and briefly
summarize literature on Whiteness in political science; and remind the reader of the literature on U.S.
foreign policy attitudes summarized in essay 2. I follow by describing the data and methods employed
and then discuss the results before offering a discussion and concluding thoughts. Overall, my findings
provide strong support for the hypothesis that race plays a major role in providing structure for public
opinion on U.S. foreign policy among White Americans.
History and Background: Race and Military Attitudes and Intervention
While it has a complex history, the idea of American “Exceptionalism” and the idea that it should
govern not only its own territory but lead the world towards liberty and democracy cannot be separated
from White supremacy and ideas like the “White Man’s Burden” (Horne 1999, 439; Horsman 1981;
Kipling 1899; Krenn 1999). Together, the Indian Wars and U.S. policy in the Caribbean provided the
foundation for U.S. foreign policy, and both were highly racialized (Horne 1999). This essay contends
with the notion that the connection between race and foreign policy is not a relic of the past, but still
81
presents a powerful force when it comes to shaping public opinion. Where the legacy of slavery,
segregation, and mass incarceration (M. Alexander 2010) provide the foundation for much of the worst in
American domestic politics (Lipsitz 2006; Tesler 2016), colonization and the notion of the “Frontier”
fulfills a similar role in the political culture of American foreign policy (and ongoing relations with
Native tribes). From the Founding, White supremacy was not just a domestic institution, but an ideology
projected internationally through U.S. military and economic power. This view of superiority has
provided justification for seemingly illiberal policies towards those deemed outside the borders of the
Constitution from Wounded Knee to Guantanamo Bay.
While the relationship between race and foreign policy has undergone changes over time, this
study expects race to play a prominent role in the foreign policy attitudes of White Americans in the
present because they have played such a role in the past. In terms of both public interest and attention, but
also the Western construction of legal sovereignty and responsibility, we often think of what happens
under territory governed by the U.S. Constitution as fundamentally different than what happens outside it,
even though it is done by the same government, institutions, and elected officials. The United States’
original borders were defined by where Native governments were still sovereign (Onion and Saunt 2014).
Relations between the U.S. federal government and the tribal governments on and off Indian Reservations
continue to be contentious and too often mirror the past rather than depart from it (Bruyneel 2007).
For early U.S. history, foreign policy in large part meant the conquest of Native lands managed
by the military and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In order to be incorporated as a state, the territory
required to have people living in it eligible for U.S. citizenship, which required legal proof not just of
82
property holding (land or slaves) but of Whiteness. In this way and many others, Whiteness itself became
a valuable commodity linked essentially to its associated social, political, and economic privileges (Harris
1993) in early “foreign policy” of the United States. White settlers occupying Native lands became a
fundamental feature of American society, represented best by the “frontier” genre of arts, sciences, and
laws designed to reify and justify American colonization. The United States existentially depended not
just on the existence of slavery, but on the destruction of Native nations and peoples. As we understand
the legacy of slavery to be central to racial formation in the United states and its constitution and
institutions, we should also recognize the importance of its early foreign policy – the colonization of
North America and the Caribbean.
While colonization – and thus racialization – has been central to military interventions by the
United States – and much of this colonization and reach has been in areas of the world from which the
U.S.’s minority groups have ancestral ties – the literature on U.S. public opinion toward American foreign
policy rarely considers the centrality of race. Some work does connect American foreign policy attitudes
to Asia and the Pacific (e.g., Horne 199; Krenn 1999; Lipsitz 2006, 71) or connects the rise of war to civil
rights in the U.S. (Klinkner 1999; Myrdal 1944). However, as I summarize and investigate in Essay 2 of
this dissertation, the bulk of the literature on U.S. foreign policy attitudes and attitudes toward military
intervention does not consider the racial attitudes of White Americans. In addition, it does not consider
the strength of White racial attachment among Whites and how that may influence attitudes about U.S.
foreign policy. For a more extensive summary of this literature on American foreign policy attitudes,
please see essay 2 of this dissertation.
83
Racialization in foreign policy attitudes may also come from the fact that many of the decision-makers at
the top levels of the U.S. government and military have been and are White, while those at the lowest
levels forced to fight in wars are not. National military strategy is made up of two components which
influence a state’s “power-creating policies” and both illuminate the impact that racialization may play in
foreign policy (Friedberg 1992, 115). The first is the material power of the state, or the extraction and
conscription of the military materials and human capital required for a specific strategy, where “[a]t the
most basic level, some individuals and groups will benefit from the process of power-creation and others
will be hurt by it” (Friedberg 1992, 115). Over the U.S. history, it has been clear that non-White members
of society have borne a disproportionate burden in powering U.S. military strategy. The second
component is ideology, where “[a]pproaches to providing for the national defense that might seem
desirable on strategic grounds (or simply because they reflect the preferences of the armed forces as a
whole or of a particularly powerful military service) can be rejected if they have internal requirements
that run counter to the dominant ideology or to the interests of influential societal groups” (Friedberg
1992, 116). Research has also found that during World War I, European immigrants to the U.S. who
served were much more likely to assimilate into American society, identifying as White rather than their
national origin or ethnicity, highlighting the ways in which national identity is influenced by the state’s
actions (Mazumder 2017). Taking into consideration that Whiteness has and continues to be a powerful
ideological force in American politics and in the military, this study considers the role that racial identity
may play in public support for the levels of spending mentioned above, and more importantly, paying the
human costs of “empire” at home and abroad.
84
Previous Studies of Whiteness
Racial identity among Whites, like all ideologies, has two major components. The first is attitudes
towards those perceived as the out-group. Out-group attitudes like racism – and operationalizations such
as “symbolic racism” (McConahay and Hough 1976), “racial resentment” (Tesler 2016), or “old-
fashioned racism” (OFR) (Virtanen and Huddy 1998; Lajevardi and Oskooii 2018) – focus on individual
attitudes about members perceived as being in the out-group.
The second major component is a sense of in-group identity, in this case, Whiteness. While
scholars in many disciplines have analyzed with what it means to be White, political science has turned to
empirical studies of the phenomena only more recently (Wong and Cho 2005; Jardina 2019). In the field
of political science, early scholarship on race focused on the legacy of slavery and its Black descendants
living in the United States, and we owe much of not only our understanding of how we think about race in
the United States to this early scholarship, but it also introduced many of the methods and measures still
employed by scholars today – terms like “racial identity” and “linked fate” were both originally
conceived to describe the experience of Black Americans living in the post-Civil Rights era United States.
While one major contribution to the broader field of knowledge this scholarship made was to study and
describe this experience, another was to develop theories and methods of studying identity that act as
frameworks for scholars that wish to study racial identity among other groups in the U.S. and around the
world. Relying on these foundations, studies of White racial identity have proliferated more widely across
the discipline.
The elections of Barack Obama and then Donald Trump elevated race to the forefront of political
discussions among Whites and forced some into a reconsideration of the cycle of racial progress and
85
racial reaction. Obama, the first Black president, was followed by Donald Trump, the “First White
President” (Coates 2017). Rather than simply the baseline or an identity that was invisible (Junn and
Masuoka 2019), part of the privilege associated with Whiteness, Whites and their racial identity seemed
to be confronted in new ways (Junn and Masuoka 2019; Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck 2018). Scholars
largely agree that this status threat perceived by Whites, while complex, relied on anxieties surrounding
demographic replacement – the idea that Whites would become a “minority” population, and the
corresponding decrease in political power, rightly receives attention (Jardina 2019). Another key
component that has been less studied, however, is the role that racial anxieties among Whites are driven
by not just their dominant status in the domestic racial hierarchy, but the U.S. standing as a dominant
power internationally (Mutz 2018).
Recent research has also found that White attitudes about Barack Obama and Donald Trump; and
the 2012 and 2016 election results may have been influenced by the perception among some Whites that
their dominant status, both domestically and internationally, was under threat (Mutz 2018). In essay 2 in
this dissertation, I review much of this emergent literature so please refer to essay 2 for a more exhaustive
summary. In general, when comparing the attitudes of White Americans to non-White Americans, Whites
are more supportive of military intervention, due in part to the fact that non-white communities face more
casualties when troops are sent into conflict (Kriner and Shen 2010).
Whiteness is a complex phenomenon. Whites “appear to be aware of their advantages”
(Branscombe, Schmitt, and Schiffhauer 2007, 213) (Branscombe, Schmitt, and Schiffhauer 2007, 213);
and justify “their privileged status by denying the existence of discrimination” (Branscombe, Schmitt, and
86
Schiffhauer 2007, 213; Schmitt 2005). Further research finds that “the prospect of unearned White
privilege, but not the existence of anti-Black discrimination, threatens Whites’ sense of self” (Unzueta
2007, 1246). Overall, “Whites generally seem aware that their economic and social privilege is in part a
function of historical racial discrimination and exhibit a strong attachment to their dominant status”
(Berry, Ebner, and Cornelius 2019, 12). Recent studies have found linked fate to be a strong correlate of
political participation among Whites in the 2012 and 2016 presidential election, suggesting that that
“Whites, despite their dominant position in the racial hierarchy, believe that their individual fate is linked
to that of their racial group” and “linked fate plays an important role in the political behavior of Whites”
(Berry, Ebner, and Cornelius 2019, 12). Whites’ positions at the top of the racial hierarchy in the United
States leads those who feel a strong sense of racial linked fate to perceive non-Whites as less worthy of
being an American at home and more threatening abroad (Masuoka and Junn 2013).
Research Design
To assess the racialization of foreign policy attitudes in American politics, I will analyze data on
racial in-group attitudes among White Americans and militarized foreign policy. I use the American
National Election Survey (ANES) as it includes a number of key measures needed for this study. In
particular, White in-group attitudes and foreign policy attitudes are asked. The variation in items allows
us to assess in the connection (or lack thereof) between White in-group attitudes and foreign policy
opinion among the U.S. public across a wide spectrum of issues. This study will focus on the 2012
ANES. While it would be ideal to examine a longer time period, the ANES only began to ask about
White identity in 2012.
87
The method of analysis is statistical regression, using OLS and logistic regression. OLS is used to
analyze ordinal dependent variables and logit for binary outcomes. The key independent variables in my
analysis are measures of White in-group attitudes. Multiple measures of in-group racial attitudes have
been developed across the social sciences, and debate is ongoing regarding which measures, if any,
reliably capture a respondent’s experience of their racial identity – especially given that relatively few
Whites grapple with their Whiteness regularly. For this reason, I employ multiple measures of in-group
attitudes for Whites.
I test my hypotheses by including three measures of in-group attitudes which previous scholars
have developed: 1) linked fate; 2) White identity; and 3) perceptions of discrimination. These measures
were chosen since research has shown them to best capture the experience of Whiteness among
Americans – one primarily based on social dominance and economic and political privilege. Full question
wording and descriptions are available in Figure 14 below. All items have been recoded so strongest
attachment is coded with the highest value. Linked fate is a composite of the two items above, creating a
four-point battery where 0 = “none”, 1= “not very much”, 2 “some”, and 3) “a lot”. White identity is
coded from 1-5, where 1=”Not at All Important”, 2=”A little important”, 3=”Moderately important”, 4
“Very important”, and 5 “Extremely important”. Discrimination against white is also coded from 1-5,
where 1=”none at all”, 2=”a little”, 3=“a moderate amount”, 4=”a lot”, and 5=”a great deal”.
88
Variable Question Wording 2012 ANES
Linked Fate link_white
Do you think what happens generally to WHITE
people in this country will have something to do
with what happens in your life? Y/N
link_whiteamt Will it affect you [a lot, some, or not very much /
White Identity ident_whiteid
How important is being White to your identity?
[extremely important, very
important, moderately important, a little important,
or not at all important?
Discrimination
Against Whites
discrim_whites
How much discrimination is there in the United
States today against each of the following groups?)
Whites
[A great deal, a lot, a moderate amount, a
little, or none at all?
Figure 14: Key Survey Measures of White In-Group Attitudes Used to Create Independent
Variables
This study focuses on White in-group attitudes as the main explanatory variable, but I also
include several additional variables previously shown to impact foreign policy attitudes: income,
partisanship, ideology, gender, authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, veteran status, education,
political interest and attention, patriotism, and religiosity. A brief justification is provided for each below,
with specific coding and measurement for all variables provided in the statistical Appendix (these control
variables are also coded identically to those parallel independent variables in essay 2). These independent
variables are included so as to control for other potentially confounding explanations. As I detailed in
essay 2 examining the role of racial resentment and is effects on some other foreign policy attitudes, there
are several other correlates of White Americans’ foreign policy attitudes. Authoritarianism influences
foreign policy attitudes (Hetherington and Suhay 2011, 536); Social Dominance Orientation (SDO)
increases support for militaristic foreign policy (M. G. Alexander, Levin, and Henry 2005; Pratto et al.
89
1994, 2000; Pratto, Stallworth, and Sidanius 1997). Gender is also important due to SDO (Pratto,
Stallworth, and Sidanius 1997) and due to perceptions of gender and leadership (Lawless 2004, 479).
Conceptually, the main dependent variables analyzed are support for “militarized” foreign policy
which is defined as “a process which involves an intensification of the labor and resources allocated to
military purposes, including the shaping of other institutions in synchrony with military goals” (Lutz
2002, 723). Militarization is “intimately connected not only to the obvious increase in the size of armies
and resurgence of militant nationalisms and militant fundamentalisms but also to the less visible
deformation of human potentials into the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and to the
shaping of national histories in ways that glorify and legitimate military action” (Bernstein 1999;
Linenthal and Engelhardt 1996; Lutz 2002, 723).
The 2012 ANES was selected because it not only includes multiple reliable measures of White in-
group attitudes (the key independent variables discussed above), but a series of items on foreign policy
that can be used to construct specific dependent variable measures. This study focuses on five dependent
variables covering important foreign policy issues facing the American public in 2012: 1) U.S. global
prominence, 2) spending on the military, 3) Iranian nuclear development, 4) the so-called “Rise of China”
(Gehrke 2019), and 5) the global war on terror. Specific item descriptions are in Figure 15 below. All
items have been recoded so that the militaristic option takes on the highest value.
90
Measure Variable Description
U.S. Global Power usworld_stronger
During the past
year, would you say that the United
States' position in the world has
grown
WEAKER, stayed ABOUT THE
SAME, or has it grown
STRONGER?
Cuts to Defense budget_rdefmil
Would you favor, oppose,
or neither favor nor oppose a plan to
reduce the federal budget deficit if it
included the following: )] Cut
military spending
Iran iran_nuksite
To try to prevent Iran from
developing nuclear weapons, would
you favor,
oppose, or neither favor nor
oppose...) The United States
bombing Iran's
nuclear development sites
China china_mil
Do you think China's military is [a
major threat to the security of the
United
States, a minor threat, or not a
threat / not a threat, a minor threat,
or a major
threat to the security of the United
States]?
Global War on Terror dhs_torture
Do you FA VOR, OPPOSE, or
NEITHER FA VOR NOR OPPOSE
the U.S.
government torturing people, who
are suspected of being terrorists, to
try to
get information?
Figure 15: Dependent Variable Measuring Support for Militarized Foreign Policy
The U.S. Global Power dependent variable measure ranges from 1 to 3. Respondents coded 1 if they said
U.S. global power was weaker, 2 if it has stayed the same, and 3 if it has grown stronger. The Cuts to
Defense dependent variable measure is from 1 to 3, where 1=”Oppose” 2=”Neither favor nor oppose” and
3=”Favor”. U.S. global power is coded from 1-3, where 1=”Weaker”, 2=”Stayed the same”, and
3=”Stronger”. Intervention in Iran is coded from 1-3, where 1=”oppose”, 2=”neither favor nor oppose”,
and 3=”favor”. The threat of China is coded from 1-3, where 1=”not a threat”, 2=”minor threat” and
91
3=”major threat”. Support for torture is coded from 1-3, where 1=”Oppose” 2=”Neither favor nor
oppose” and 3=”Favor”.
Results and Analysis
The results discussed below provide support for the hypothesis that racial in-group attitudes are
associated with strong support for militarism for Whites in the United States. As mentioned earlier and
shown in Figure 3 above, using the 2012 ANES, I employed three different measures of White in-group
attitudes: 1) linked fate, 2) White identity, and 3) perceived discrimination against Whites. These three
independent variables are modeled across four policy areas: 1) U.S. military spending and general policy,
2) Iran, and 3) China, and 4) the Global War on Terror.
Table 11: White Linked Fate and Militarism
92
Variables Included but Not Displayed: Interest and Attention, PID, Religiosity, Authoritarianism,
Egalitarianism, Male, Age, Income. For full results, see Appendix Table A1.
Table 11 shows results for analysis of the connection between linked fate among Whites and their
attitudes regarding U.S. militarism. Whites that reported high levels of racial linked fate were much less
likely (p<0.01) to believe that the U.S. was in a stronger position in the world than the previous year.
Reports of linked fate are also strongly correlated with rejecting cuts to defense (p<0.05), supporting
military action against Iran (p<0.05), and believing that China represents a military threat to the U.S.
(p<0.01). However, linked fate was not strongly correlated with support for torture of suspected terrorists.
Contrary to expectations, linked fate among Whites was positively correlated with support for cuts to
defense spending (p<0.05). Further analysis is needed, but this could reflect opposition to government
spending generally. Overall, linked fate shows a strong relationship with support for U.S. militarism
across several policy areas, providing support for my hypothesis.
93
Table 12: Perceived Discrimination Against Whites and Militarism
Variables Included but Not Displayed: Interest and Attention, PID, Religiosity, Authoritarianism,
Egalitarianism, Male, Age, Income. For full results, see Appendix Table A2
Turning to Table 12, results are provided for analysis of the connection between White in-group
attitudes and militaristic foreign policy using perceived discrimination against Whites as the
operationalization of in-group identity. Again, the results provide substantial support for this study’s
hypothesis: that White in-group racial attitudes play a major role in attitudes regarding foreign policy and
U.S. militarism. The perception that Whites are being discriminated against is strongly correlated with
rejecting cuts to the military budget (p<0.01), bombing Iran (p<0.01), evaluating China as a military
threat (p<0.001), and supporting the torture of suspected terrorists (p<0.05). These results are consistent
with findings that individuals who believe that Whites are being discriminated against may be expressing
94
a form of “status threat” at both the domestic and international level (Mutz 2018). However, given the
results in Tables 1 and 3, further research into the complex relationship between racial identity and
political attitudes is clearly merited.
Table 13: White Identity and Militarism
Variables Included but Not Displayed: Interest and Attention, PID, Religiosity, Authoritarianism,
Egalitarianism, Male, Age, Income. For full results, see Appendix Table A3
Concluding with Table 13, the results provide some support for my hypothesis, but also some
reasons to express skepticism. While previous research has shown White identity to play a meaningful
role in attitude formation and political beliefs, these views do not seem to extend to attitudes regarding
foreign policy except for one major exception: White identity is strongly associated with supporting the
95
torture of suspected terrorists. However, in the four models where the outcome variables are U.S.
strength, Defense Cuts, Bomb Iran, and China Threat, there is no statistical association between White
identity and these foreign policy attitudes. White identity seems to have the weakest relationship with
these attitudes when considering these results in Table 13 in contrast to those in Tables 11 and 12.
Overall, White in-group attitudes are strongly correlated with public opinion regarding foreign
policy, robust to several operationalizations of the independent variable of White racial identification, and
across an array of dependent variables regarding militarism. This is especially the case when White in-
group attitudes are measured as White linked fate and perceptions of discrimination toward Whites.
However, in-group attitudes are not the only variable shown to have a strong relationship with foreign
policy attitudes. For instance, in Table 13, I find that military veterans are more likely to oppose cuts to
defense spending. However, veteran status did not have a meaningful statistical impact on their support
for U.S. militarism in any of the models.
Out-group racial attitudes, measured as racial resentment, were included in the models along with the in-
group measures of primary interest in order to analyze the dual nature of group identity. As I found in
Chapter 2, racial resentment has a strong and consistent impact on support for U.S. militarism across
models. Including both in-group and out-group attitudes in the same model also is a first step at
disentangling one from the other not just in opinion on foreign policy, but on public opinion and racial
attitudes more generally.
96
Conclusion and Discussion
This article advances the hypothesis that White Americans who feel most strongly about their in-
group are the most likely to support the militarization of U.S. foreign relations and the perception of non-
White foreign nations and peoples as threatening. This effort is motivated by trying to understand
Whiteness not only as an identity rooted in slavery and domination at home, but in colonization and
imperialism abroad. While some recent scholarship in the field of political science has begun to explore
the connection between perceived threats to their status and globalization (Mutz 2018), further study is
clearly merited.
This study provides the first analysis of White Americans’ racial in-group attitudes and their
beliefs regarding U.S. national security policy. Scholars have frequently examined racial attitudes and
domestic policy, though examinations of White racial attitudes have typically stopped at the water’s edge.
Scholars who study Americans’ international policy attitudes have rarely, if ever, considered the role of
race. Race and Whites’ in-group attitudes are linked to their support for U.S. national security policy.
The study’s specific findings are that White Americans with high levels of in-group strength are
much more likely to support high levels of military spending, imperial ambitions, and military
interventions when compared to White Americans who score much lower on these in-group attitudes.
Similarly, White Americans are also found to perceive other nations as threatening and favor the use of
torture to interrogate suspected terror suspects if they feel strongly about their racial identity.
Scholars have established a connection between American identity and militarism. Furthermore,
American identity has often been conditional on Whiteness. It should come as no surprise, then, that
97
Whiteness should have strong connection to militarism. Yet this is a surprising finding when one
canvasses the extant research. Nearly all scholarship on military attitudes of Americans, and especially
White Americans, has not taken the role of race as seriously as I do here. The findings here show that the
role of White racial identity and in-group attitudes is central to our understanding of White American
support for U.S. military policy. Other studies have theorized about such linkages, but this is the first
study to systematically examine the relationship between White in-group attitudes and militarism at the
individual level. I find that a sense of racial linked fate, feeling that Whites are being discriminated
against, and a strong sense of White racial identity is strongly associated with support for U.S.
militarism.
In terms of general U.S. policy, White respondents who feel strongly about their racial identity
were much less likely to support cuts to defense spending and also more likely to believe that the U.S.
was losing its status and power in the world. Donald Trump campaigned on both expanding U.S. defense
spending and restoring the U.S. to global dominance. This latter finding provides support for previous
research which indicates that “status threat” at the international level has helped stoke racial anxiety
among Whites (Mutz 2018). Correspondingly, Whites who feel strongly about their racial identity are also
much more likely to perceive China as a military threat to the United States. Donald Trump has made
confrontation with China, including a trade war, a centerpiece of his foreign policy agenda. In-group
racial attitudes are also strong predictors of support for military intervention in Iran, especially interesting
considering the abandonment of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and turn towards
aggressive confrontation, exemplified by the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, taken by
the Trump Administration late in his first term.
98
Trump’s verbal confrontations with China and Iran have continued during the COVID-19 crisis in
2020. Given the results presented in this chapter, future scholarship could extend these analyses and
examine White Americans’ in-group attitudes and how they affect the perceived origins and blame for
COVID-19. U.S. domestic policy attitudes among White Americans about this public health crisis may be
shaped by their in-group racial and military attitudes too, given the findings in this dissertation. Whiteness
in the United States is fundamentally rooted not just in its domestic policy, but also in its foreign policy.
In order to more fully understand the impact of Whiteness, then, this study analyzed the
contemporary role of racial in-group attitudes in U.S. public opinion regarding national security among
White Americans. This harkens back to the work of scholars like William Baldwin, who remarks that
being an American has always meant being White (Baldwin 1998). This is a legal and political reality, but
it also has defined the literal borders and full membership of the citizenry of the United States.
The conflict between supporting freedom and democracy came to a head early in the history of
U.S. foreign policy when the residents, many of them slaves, of the French colony of Saint-Domingue, or
what is now Haiti, overthrew the colonial government and established a free and independent nation.
While their fight for freedom and liberty was seen as noble, a slave revolt was among the longest and
deeply held anxieties of slaveholders in the South. Toussaint Louverture became the nation’s first
president in 1804, but the U.S. and President Thomas Jefferson refused to recognize or trade with the
government of Haiti, and it would actively conspire at times with the French and British regimes to
exploit the ongoing political turmoil in the Republic of Haiti. Rather than use its newly found power to
support the movement for freedom and sovereignty in a nation just 700 miles away, the U.S. sought
99
primarily to use military force, including using privateers, to protect its economic interests in the region
and support the European colonizers. This case is early in the U.S. history but, like Columbus’ first
voyages, this first contact between the free and independent nations of the United States and Haiti would
set the stage for many encounters henceforth and was emblematic of the relationship between the U.S.
and its sovereign neighbors throughout the world. Haiti again exemplifies this point: the U.S. intervened
militarily to influence politics in Haiti at least seven different times since 1804, including occupations
from 1915-34 and 1994-95.
The United States currently occupies five populated “territories” which function much like U.S.
states but with one key difference: they do not have voting members of the U.S. congress, and their
residents, despite the fact that most residents are U.S. citizens, cannot vote for U.S. president. Puerto Rico
and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, along with the Northern Mariana Islands (Saipan), American
Samoa, and Guam in the Pacific. In 1776, American colonists rebelled against the notion of taxation by
the British Empire without having representation in its democratic institutions in Parliament. The irony of
this cannot be lost not only on the residents of these colonies, but also for the U.S. servicemembers from
these territories – where military service is at a higher rate than all U.S. states. While this again shows that
military service can be a vector for assimilation to the U.S., it also shows that the borders of American
empire extend far outside the United States. The projection of this power, including in no small part
drawing the boundaries of Constitutional protections, is strongly influenced by the role of racial identity
among White Americans.
100
While this discussion of Haiti and U.S. territories is historic, and the analysis presented here is
contemporary, this historic linkage between race, place, and military intervention is critical to
understanding U.S. military and foreign policy – and the attitudes of White Americans toward security
and foreign policy. White attitudes in the contemporary era may be stoked by President Donald Trump,
but the association between white racial attitudes, white in-group identity, and attitudes toward foreign
policy has been strong and persistent. This essay’s argument, bolstered with contemporary findings, that
white American in-group attitudes influence support for increased military intervention and American
empire should come as no surprise given the nation’s deep and racialized history of foreign intervention.
White Americans’ attitudes supporting extensive U.S. intervention and militarism overseas are linked to
the strength of their in-group attitudes.
101
References
Abramowitz, Alan I. 1989. “Viability, Electability, and Candidate Choice in a Presidential
Primary Election: A Test of Competing Models.” The Journal of Politics 51 (4): 977–92.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2131544.
———. 2010. The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American
Democracy. Yale University Press.
Acheson, Dean. 1970. Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department. W. W. Norton
& Company.
Aldrich, John H., Christopher Gelpi, Peter Feaver, Jason Reifler, and Thompson Sharp. 2006.
“Foreign Policy and the Electoral Connection.” Annual Review of Political Science 9:
477–502.
Alexander, Michele G., Shana Levin, and P. J. Henry. 2005. “Image Theory, Social Identity, and
Social Dominance: Structural Characteristics and Individual Motives Underlying
International Images.” Political Psychology 26 (1): 27–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-
9221.2005.00408.x.
Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow. The New Press. https://thenewpress.com/books/
new-jim-crow (April 23, 2020).
Allan, Bentley B. 2018. “Scientific Cosmology and International Orders by Bentley B. Allan.”
Cambridge Core. April 2018. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108241540.
Almond, Gabriel Abraham. 1950. The American People and Foreign Policy. Harcourt, Brace.
Alvarez, R. Michael, and J. Andrew Sinclair. 2015. Nonpartisan Primary Election Reform:
Mitigating Mischief. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
102
“American National Election Survey.” 2019. ANES | American National Election Studies. 2019.
https://electionstudies.org/.
Ansolabehere, Stephen, John Mark Hansen, Shigeo Hirano, and James M. Snyder Jr. 2007. “The
Incumbency Advantage in U.S. Primary Elections.” Electoral Studies 26 (3): 660–68.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2007.06.003.
Atkeson, Lonna Rae. 1998. “Divisive Primaries and General Election Outcomes: Another Look
at Presidental Campaigns.” American Journal of Political Science 42 (1): 256–71. https://
doi.org/10.2307/2991755.
Avdan, Nazli, and Clayton Webb. 2018. “Not in My Back Yard: Public Perceptions and
Terrorism, Not in My Back Yard: Public Perceptions and Terrorism.” Political Research
Quarterly, May, 1065912918776118. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912918776118.
Bacevich, Andrew. 2004. American Empire. Harvard University Press.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674013759.
Bachman, Jerald G., and M. Kent Jennings. 1975. “The Impact of Vietnam on Trust in
Government.” Journal of Social Issues 31 (4): 141–55. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-
4560.1975.tb01017.x.
Baldwin, James. 1998. “On Being ‘White’, and Other Lies.” In Black on White: Black Writers
on What It Means to Be White. Schocken Books. https://www.amazon.com/Black-White-
Writers-What-Means/dp/0805211144.
Bardes, Barbara, and Robert Oldendick. 1978. “Beyond Internationalism: A Case for Multiple
Dimensions in the Structure of Foreign Policy Attitudes.” Social Science Quarterly;
Austin, Tex. 59 (3): 496–508.
103
Bargh, John A. 1999. “The Cognitive Monster: The Case against the Controllability of
Automatic Stereotype Effects.,” January.
Baum, Matthew A., and Philip B.K. Potter. 2008. “The Relationships Between Mass Media,
Public Opinion, and Foreign Policy: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis.” Annual Review of
Political Science 11 (1): 39–65.
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.11.060406.214132.
Baum, Matthew, and Tim J. Groeling. 2010. War Stories: The Causes and Consequences of
Public Views of War. Princeton University Press.
Bennett, STEPHEN EARL. 1974. “‘ATTITUDE STRUCTURES’ AND FOREIGN POLICY
OPINIONS.” Social Science Quarterly 55 (3): 732–42.
Bernstein, Barton J. 1999. “Reconsidering ‘Invasion Most Costly’: Popular-History Scholarship,
Publishing Standards, and the Claim of High U.S. Casualty Estimates to Help Legitimize
the Atomic Bombings.” Peace & Change 24 (2): 220–48. https://doi.org/10.1111/0149-
0508.00119.
Berry, Justin A., David Ebner, and Michelle Cornelius. 2019. “White Identity Politics: Linked
Fate and Political Participation.” Politics, Groups, and Identities 0 (0): 1–19.
https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1615965.
Bitecofer, Rachel. 2019. “With 16 Months to Go, Negative Partisanship Predicts the 2020
Presidential Election.” SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 3414607. Rochester, NY: Social
Science Research Network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3414607.
Black, Duncan. 1948. “On the Rationale of Group Decision-Making.” Journal of Political
Economy 56 (1): 23–34.
104
Blauwkamp, Joan M, Charles M Rowling, and William Pettit. 2018. “Are Americans Really
Okay with Torture? The Effects of Message Framing on Public Opinion, Are Americans
Really Okay with Torture? The Effects of Message Framing on Public Opinion.” Media,
War & Conflict, February, 1750635217753655.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1750635217753655.
Boettcher, William A. 2004. “Military Intervention Decisions Regarding Humanitarian Crises,
Military Intervention Decisions Regarding Humanitarian Crises: Framing Induced Risk
Behavior, Framing Induced Risk Behavior.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 48 (3): 331–
55. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002704264271.
Bond, Jon R., Cary Covington, and Richard Fleisher. 1985. “Explaining Challenger Quality in
Congressional Elections.” The Journal of Politics 47 (02): 510–529.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2130894.
Box-Steffensmeier, Janet M. 1996. “A Dynamic Analysis of The Role of War Chests in
Campaign Strategy.” American Journal of Political Science 40 (2): 352–71.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2111628.
Brady, David W., Hahrie Han, and Jeremy C. Pope. 2007. “Primary Elections and Candidate
Ideology: Out of Step with the Primary Electorate?” Legislative Studies Quarterly 32 (1):
79–105.
Branscombe, Nyla R., Michael T. Schmitt, and Kristin Schiffhauer. 2007. “Racial Attitudes in
Response to Thoughts of White Privilege.” European Journal of Social Psychology
37(2): 203–15.
Brewer, Susan A. 2009. Why America Fights Patriotism and War Propaganda from the
Philippines to Iraq. New York: Oxford University Press.
105
Brown University. 2020. “Costs of War.” Costs of War. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/
(April 22, 2020).
Bruyneel, Kevin. 2007. The Third Space of Sovereignty. University of Minnesota.
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-third-space-of-sovereignty (April
23, 2020).
Bullock, JOHN G. 2011. “Elite Influence on Public Opinion in an Informed Electorate.” The
American Political Science Review 105 (3): 496–515.
Burstein, Paul, and William Freudenburg. 1978. “Changing Public Policy: The Impact of Public
Opinion, Antiwar Demonstrations, and War Costs on Senate Voting on Vietnam War
Motions.” American Journal of Sociology 84 (1): 99–122.
https://doi.org/10.1086/226742. https://doi.org/10.3162/036298007X201994.
Canes-Wrone, Brandice, William G. Howell, and David E. Lewis. 2008. “Toward a Broader
Understanding of Presidential Power: A Reevaluation of the Two Presidencies Thesis.”
Journal of Politics 70(1): 1–16.
Carey, John M., and John Polga-Hecimovich. 2006. “Primary Elections and Candidate Strength
in Latin America.” Journal of Politics 68 (3): 530–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-
2508.2006.00443.x.
Chen-Fruen, Blue. 2017. “American Samoa Army Recruiting Station Again Ranked #1
Worldwide | Pacific Islands Report.” Pacific Islands Report: 1.
Choi, Seung-Whan, Kim, Youngwhan, David Ebner, and Patrick James. 2020. “Human Rights
Institutionalization and U.S. Humanitarian Military Intervention.” International
Interactions.
106
Citrin, Jack, Donald P. Green, Christopher Muste, and Cara Wong. 1997. “Public Opinion
Toward Immigration Reform: The Role of Economic Motivations.” The Journal of
Politics 59 (3): 858–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/2998640.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2017. “The First White President.” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/
magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/ (November
26, 2018).
Conrad, Courtenay R., Sarah E. Croco, Brad T. Gomez, and Will H. Moore. 2017. “Threat
Perception and American Support for Torture.” Political Behavior, September, 1–21.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9433-5.
Converse, Philip E. 1964. “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics (1964).” Critical
Review 18 (1–3): 1–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/08913810608443650.
Cox, Gary W. 2010. “Swing V oters, Core V oters, and Distributive Politics.” In Political
Representation, edited by Ian Shapiro, Susan C. Stokes, Elisabeth Jean Wood, and
Alexander S. Kirshner, 342–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
http://ebooks.cambridge.org/ref/id/CBO9780511813146A030.
Cox, Michael. 2001. “Whatever Happened to American Decline? International Relations and the
New United States Hegemony.” New Political Economy 6 (3): 311–40.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13563460120091333.
“The Cook Political Report - Charts - 2012 House Competitive Races.” n.d. Accessed June 16,
2016. http://cookpolitical.com/archive/chart/house/race-ratings/2012-06-07_13-49-21.
Davis, Darren W., and Brian D. Silver. 2004. “Civil Liberties vs. Security: Public Opinion in the
Context of the Terrorist Attacks on America.” American Journal of Political Science 48
(1): 28–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0092-5853.2004.00054.x.
107
DeConde, Alexander. 1992. Ethnicity, Race, and American Foreign Policy: A History. UPNE.
DeGrasse, R. W. 2016. Military Expansion, Economic Decline : Impact of Military Spending on
United States Economic Performance. Routledge.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315495897.
Devine, Patricia G. 1989. “Stereotypes and Prejudice: Their Automatic and Controlled
Components.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56 (1): 5–18. https://doi.org/
10.1037/0022-3514.56.1.5.
Dexter, Lewis Anthony, Raymond A. Bauer, and Ithiel de Sola Pool. 1963. American Business
and Public Policy: The Politics of Foreign Trade. 2nd edition. Chicago: Aldine
Transaction.
Downs, Anthony. 1957. “An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy.” Journal of
Political Economy 65 (2): 135–50.
Duncan, Mike. “The Thirteen Colonies.” https://www.revolutionspodcast.com/2014/02/017-the-
new-world.html (April 22, 2014).
Edwards, George C., William Mitchell, and Reed Welch. 1995. “Explaining Presidential
Approval: The Significance of Issue Salience.” American Journal of Political Science 39
(1): 108–34. https://doi.org/10.2307/2111760.
Enders, Adam M., and Jamil S. Scott. 2019. “The Increasing Racialization of American Electoral
Politics, 1988-2016.” American Politics Research 47 (2): 275–303.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X18755654.
Eoyang, Mieke, and Peter Billerbeck. 2014. “Making the Case: Congress Should Pass New
Authorization for Use of Force Against ISIS.” Third Way, 2014.
108
https://www.thirdway.org/report/making-the-case-congress-should-pass-new-
authorization-for-use-of-force-against-isis.
Erskine, Hazel Gaudet. 1963. “The Polls: Exposure to International Information.” The Public
Opinion Quarterly 27 (4): 658–62.
Espiritu, Yen Le. 1992. Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities.
Temple University Press.
———. 2008. Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love. Rowman & Littlefield.
Fawn, Rick, and Raymond Hinnebusch. 2006. The Iraq War Causes and Consequences. Lynne
Rienner Publishers.
https://www.rienner.com/title/The_Iraq_War_Causes_and_Consequences.
Fenno, Richard F. 1977. “U.S. House Members in Their Constituencies: An Exploration.” The
American Political Science Review 71 (3): 883–917. https://doi.org/10.2307/1960097.
———. 1978. Home Style: House Members in Their Districts. Longman.
Fouirnaies, Alexander, and Andrew B. Hall. 2016. “How Divisive Primaries Hurt Parties:
Evidence from Near-Runoffs.” SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 2775324. Rochester, NY:
Social Science Research Network. http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2775324.
Franck, Thomas M. 1991. “Courts and Foreign Policy.” Foreign Policy (83): 66–86.
Free, Lloyd A., and Hadley Cantril. 1968. The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public
Opinion. Simon and Schuster, Inc.
Friedberg, Aaron L. 1992. “Why Didn’t the United States Become a Garrison State?”
International Security 16(4): 109–42.
Gehrke, Joel. 2019. “State Department Preparing for Clash of Civilizations with China.”
Washington Examiner, April 30, 2019, Online edition, sec. Defense & National Security.
109
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/state-department-
preparing-for-clash-of-civilizations-with-china.
Gerber, Alan S., Donald P. Green, and Ron Shachar. 2003. “V oting May Be Habit-Forming:
Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment.” American Journal of Political Science
47 (3): 540–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-5907.00038.
Gilens, Martin, and Benjamin I. Page. 2014. “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites,
Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.” Perspectives on Politics 12 (3): 564–81.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595.
Gilens, Martin, Paul M. Sniderman, and James H. Kuklinski. 1998. “Affirmative Action and the
Politics of Realignment.” British Journal of Political Science 28 (1): 159–83.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123498000143.
Gilens, Martin. 1996. “‘Race Coding’ and White Opposition to Welfare.” The American
Political Science Review 90 (3): 593–604. https://doi.org/10.2307/2082611.
Goldberg, David Howard. 1990. Foreign Policy and Ethnic Interest Groups: American and
Canadian Jews Lobby for Israel. Greenwood Publishing Group.
Gramlich, John. 2018. “Since 9/11, Americans Have Seen Anti-Terrorism Policy as a Top
Priority.” Pew Research Center (blog). September 11, 2018.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/11/defending-against-terrorism-has-
remained-a-top-policy-priority-for-americans-since-9-11/.
Grose, Christian R. 2020. “Reducing Legislative Polarization: Top-Two and Open Primaries Are
Associated with More Moderate Legislators.” Journal of Political Institutions and
Political Economy 1:2.” Journal of Political Insitutions and Political Economy 1 (2).
110
Grose, Christian R., and Bruce I. Oppenheimer. 2007. “The Iraq War, Partisanship, and
Candidate Attributes: Explaining Variation in Partisan Swing in the 2006 U.S. House
Elections.” SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 1003422. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research
Network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1003422.
Grose, Christian R., Neil Malhotra, and Robert Parks Van Houweling. 2015. “Explaining
Explanations: How Legislators Explain Their Policy Positions and How Citizens React.”
American Journal of Political Science 59 (3): 724–743.
Guilford, Gwynn. 2018. “The Dangerous Economics of Racial Resentment during World War
II.” Quartz, February 13, 2018. https://qz.com/1201502/japanese-internment-camps-
during-world-war-ii-are-a-lesson-in-the-scary-economics-of-racial-resentment/.
Hacker, Andrew. 1965. “Does A ‘Divisive’ Primary Harm a Candidate’s Election Chances?” The
American Political Science Review 59 (1): 105–10. https://doi.org/10.2307/1976124.
Hall, Andrew B. 2015. “What Happens When Extremists Win Primaries?” American Political
Science Review 109 (01): 18–42. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055414000641.
Hall, Andrew B., and Daniel M. Thompson. 2018. “Who Punishes Extremist Nominees?
Candidate Ideology and Turning Out the Base in US Elections.” American Political
Science Review, March, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055418000023.
Harris, Cheryl I. 1993. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106 (8): 1707–91. https://
doi.org/10.2307/1341787.
Henderson, Michael, D. Sunshine Hillygus, and Trevor Tompson. 2010. “‘Sour Grapes’ or
Rational V oting? V oter Decision Making Among Thwarted Primary V oters in 2008.”
Public Opinion Quarterly 74 (3): 499–529. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfq008.
111
Henry, P. J., and David O. Sears. 2002. “The Symbolic Racism 2000 Scale.” Political
Psychology 23 (2): 253–83. https://doi.org/10.1111/0162-895X.00281.
Herrmann, Richard K. 2013. “Perceptions and Image Theory in International Relations.” The
Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, September.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199760107.013.0011.
Herrmann, Richard K., and Michael P. Fischerkeller. 1995. “Beyond the Enemy Image and Spiral
Model: Cognitive–Strategic Research after the Cold War.” In .
https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020818300033336.
Hetherington, Marc, and Elizabeth Suhay. 2011. “Authoritarianism, Threat, and Americans’
Support for the War on Terror.” American Journal of Political Science 55 (3): 546–60.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00514.x.
Heywood. 2015. 120 Linda Heywood et al., Editors. African Americans in U.S. Foreign Policy:
From the Era of Frederick Douglass to the Age of Obama. https://academic.oup.com/ahr/
article/120/3/1160/19834 (July 19, 2019).
Hirano, Shigeo. 2010. “Primary Elections and Partisan Polarization in the U.S. Congress.”
Quarterly Journal of Political Science 5 (2): 169–91.
https://doi.org/10.1561/100.00008052.
Hirschfeld, Lawrence. 1998. “Race in the Making | The MIT Press.” 1998.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/race-making.
Hogan, Robert E. 2003. “Sources of Competition in State Legislative Primary Elections.”
Legislative Studies Quarterly 28 (1): 103–26.
https://doi.org/10.3162/036298003X200827.
112
Holsti, Ole R. 1992. “Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: Challenges to the Almond-Lippmann
Consensus Mershon Series: Research Programs and Debates.” International Studies
Quarterly 36 (4): 439–66. https://doi.org/10.2307/2600734.
———. 2004. Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, Revised Edition. University of
Michigan Press.
Horne, Gerald. 1999. “Race from Power: U.S. Foreign Policy and the General Crisis of ‘White
Supremacy.’” Diplomatic History 23 (3): 437–61. https://doi.org/10.1111/0145-
2096.00176.
Horsman, Reginald. 1981. Race and Manifest Destiny: Origins of American Racial Anglo-
Saxonism. Reprint edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Huddy, Leonie, Stanley Feldman, Charles Taber, and Gallya Lahav. 2005. “Threat, Anxiety, and
Support of Antiterrorism Policies.” American Journal of Political Science 49 (3): 593–
608. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2005.00144.x.
Huff, Connor, and Joshua D. Kertzer. 2017. “People Are More Likely to Describe a Violent
Event as Terrorism If the Perpetrator Is Muslim and Has Policy Goals.” Online resource.
USApp - American Politics and Policy Blog. October 20, 2017.
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/.
Hurwitz, Jon, and Mark Peffley. 1987. “How Are Foreign Policy Attitudes Structured? A
Hierarchical Model.” The American Political Science Review 81 (4): 1099–1120.
https://doi.org/10.2307/1962580.
Hutchings, Vincent, and Nicholas A. Valentino. 2004. “The Centrality of Race in American
Politics.” Annual Review of Political Science 7: 383–408.
113
Ikenberry, G. John. 1988. “Conclusion: An Institutional Approach to American Foreign
Economic Policy.” International Organization 42 (1): 219–43.
Immerwahr, Daniel. 2019. How to Hide an Empire. Macmillan Press.
https://us.macmillan.com/howtohideanempire/danielimmerwahr/9780374172145 (April
11, 2020).
Jacobs, Lawrence R., and Benjamin I. Page. 2005. “Who Influences U.S. Foreign Policy?”
American Political Science Review 99 (1): 107–23.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S000305540505152X.
Jacobson, Gary C. 2006. “Campaign Spending Effects in U.S. Senate Elections: Evidence from
the National Annenberg Election Survey.” Electoral Studies 25 (2): 195–226.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2005.05.005.
———. 2009. The Politics of Congressional Elections. Pearson/Longman.
Jardina, Ashley. 2019. White Identity Politics. 1st edition edition. Cambridge, United Kingdom:
Cambridge University Press.
Jeong, Gyung-Ho, and Paul J. Quirk. 2019. “Division at the Water’s Edge: The Polarization of
Foreign Policy.” American Politics Research 47 (1): 58–87.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X17719721.
Junn, Jane, and Natalie Masuoka. 2019. “The Gender Gap Is a Race Gap: Women V oters in US
Presidential Elections.” Perspectives on Politics: 1–11.
Kam, Cindy D., and Donald R. Kinder. 2007. “Terror and Ethnocentrism: Foundations of
American Support for the War on Terrorism.” Journal of Politics 69 (2): 320–38. https://
doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2508.2007.00534.x.
114
Kam, Cindy D., and Donald R. Kinder. 2007. “Terror and Ethnocentrism: Foundations of
American Support for the War on Terrorism.” Journal of Politics 69(2): 320–38.
Kang, Wha In. 2007. “The Media-Government Relations: Comparative Analysis of the United
States, South Korea and North Korea’s Media Coverage of Foreign Policy.” Rutgers
University - Graduate School - New Brunswick. https://doi.org/10.7282/T3MP53N7.
Kenney, Patrick J., and Tom W. Rice. 1987. “The Relationship between Divisive Primaries and
General Election Outcomes.” American Journal of Political Science 31 (1): 31–44.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2111323.
Kertzer, Joshua D., and Thomas Zeitzoff. 2017. “A Bottom-Up Theory of Public Opinion about
Foreign Policy.” American Journal of Political Science 61 (3): 543–58.
https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12314.
Kinder, Donald R., and Allison Dale-Riddle. 2011. The End of Race?: Obama, 2008, and Racial
Politics in America. Yale University Press. https://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=d1uA1myFxMgC&oi=fnd&pg=PP6&dq=kinder+dale+riddle&ots=_4aK
003HsS&sig=JFQA8RK_iz4xxdC5yRk6M47NAY8#v=onepage&q=kinder%20dale
%20riddle&f=false.
Kinder, Donald R., and Nicholas Winter. 2001. “Exploring the Racial Divide: Blacks, Whites,
and Opinion on National Policy.” American Journal of Political Science 45 (2): 439.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2669351.
King, Angela. 2020. “Map of U.S. Territories.” Geology.com. https://geology.com/state-map/us-
territories.shtml (April 25, 2020).
King, Desmond S., and Rogers M. Smith. 2005. “Racial Orders in American Political
Development.” The American Political Science Review 99 (1): 75–92.
115
Kipling, Rudyard. 1899. The White Man’ s Burden: A Poem. New York: Doubleday and McClure
Co.
Kissinger, Henry, and James H. Billington. 2001. Does America Need a Foreign Policy?:
Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century. Simon and Schuster.
Klinkner, Philip. 1999. The Unsteady March. University of Chicago Press.
https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo3637785.html.
Konitzer, Tobias B., Shanto Iyengar, Nicholas A. Valentino, Stuart Soroka, and Raymond M.
Duch. 2018. “Ethnocentrism versus Group-Specific Stereotyping in Immigration
Opinion: Cross-National Evidence on the Distinctiveness of Immigrant Groups.” Journal
of Ethnic and Migration Studies 0 (0): 1–24.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2018.1431109.
Krenn, Michael L. 1999. The Impact of Race on U.S. Foreign Policy: A Reader. Taylor &
Francis.
Kriner, Douglas J., and Francis X. Shen. 2010. The Casualty Gap: The Causes and
Consequences of American Wartime Inequalities. Oxford, New York: Oxford University
Press.
Kruse, Kevin, and Stephen Tuck. 2012. Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights
Movement. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Kull, Steven, Clay Ramsay, and Evan Lewis. 2003. “Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq
War.” Political Science Quarterly 118 (4): 569–98. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-
165X.2003.tb00406.x.
116
Lajevardi, Nazita, and Kassra A. R. Oskooii. 2018. “Old-Fashioned Racism, Contemporary
Islamophobia, and the Isolation of Muslim Americans in the Age of Trump.” Journal of
Race, Ethnicity and Politics 3 (1): 112–52. https://doi.org/10.1017/rep.2017.37.
Lau, Richard R., Thad A. Brown, and David O. Sears. 1978. “Self-Interest and Civilians’
Attitudes Toward the Vietnam War.” Public Opinion Quarterly 42 (4): 464–82.
https://doi.org/10.1086/268474.
Lawless, Jennifer L. 2004. “Women, War, and Winning Elections: Gender Stereotyping in the
Post-September 11th Era.” Political Research Quarterly 57 (3): 479–90.
https://doi.org/10.1177/106591290405700312.
Lengle, James I., Diana Owen, and Molly W. Sonner. 1995. “Divisive Nominating Mechanisms
and Democratic Party Electoral Prospects.” The Journal of Politics 57 (02): 370–383.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2960311.
Levy, Morris, and Matthew Wright. 2020. Immigration and the American Ethos. Cambridge
University Press.
Liebmann, Matthew J., Joshua Farella, Christopher I. Roos, Adam Stack, Sarah Martini, and
Thomas W. Swetnam. 2016. “Native American Depopulation, Reforestation, and Fire
Regimes in the Southwest United States, 1492–1900 CE.” Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 113 (6): E696–704. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1521744113.
Linenthal, Edward T., and Tom Engelhardt, eds. 1996. History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other
Battles for the American Past. 1st edition. New York: Holt Paperbacks.
Lippmann, Walter. 1946. Public Opinion. Transaction Publishers.
Lipsitz, George. 2006. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from
Identity Politics, Revised and Expanded Edition. Temple University Press.
117
Lipsitz, George. 2006. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from
Identity Politics, Revised and Expanded Edition. Temple University Press.
Lizotte, Mary-Kate. 2017. “Gender Differences in Support for Torture.” Journal of Conflict
Resolution 61 (4): 772–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002715595698.
Lowe, Lisa. 1996. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Duke University Press.
Lutz, Catherine. 2002. “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the
Current Crisis.” American Anthropologist 104 (3): 723–35.
https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2002.104.3.723.
———. 2009. The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts.
Washington Square, N.Y: NYU Press.
Maggiotto, Michael A., and Eugene R. Wittkopf. 1981. “American Public Attitudes Toward
Foreign Policy.” International Studies Quarterly 25 (4): 601–31.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2600514.
Makse, Todd, and Anand E. Sokhey. 2010. “Revisiting the Divisive Primary Hypothesis: 2008
and the Clinton—Obama Nomination Battle.” American Politics Research 38 (2): 233–
65. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X09359560.
Malamud, Ofer, and Abigail Wozniak. 2012. “The Impact of College on Migration Evidence
from the Vietnam Generation.” Journal of Human Resources 47 (4): 913–50.
https://doi.org/10.3368/jhr.47.4.913.
Markus, Gregory B., and Philip E. Converse. 1979. “A Dynamic Simultaneous Equation Model
of Electoral Choice.” American Political Science Review 73 (4): 1055–70. https://doi.org/
10.2307/1953989.
118
Mason, Liliana. 2018. Uncivil Agreement. University of Chicago Press.
https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo27527354.html.
Masuoka, Natalie, and Jane Junn. 2013. The Politics of Belonging. University of Chicago Press.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo16095740.html (April 24, 2020).
Mayhew, David R. 1974. “Congressional Elections: The Case of the Vanishing Marginals.”
Polity 6 (3): 295–317. https://doi.org/10.2307/3233931.
Mazumder, Soumyajit. 2017. “Becoming White: How Mass Warfare Turned Immigrants into
Americans.” SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 3079876. Rochester, NY: Social Science
Research Network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3079876.
McCann, James A. 1995. “Nomination Politics and Ideological Polarization: Assessing the
Attitudinal Effects of Campaign Involvement.” The Journal of Politics 57 (1): 101–20.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2960273.
McCleary, Daniel F., Meagan L. Nalls, and Robert L. Williams. 2009. “Types of Patriotism as
Primary Predictors of Continuing Support for the Iraq War.” Journal of Political and
Military Sociology; DeKalb 37 (1): 77-0_4.
McConahay, John B., and Joseph C. Hough. 1976. “Symbolic Racism.” Journal of Social Issues.
April 1, 1976. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1976.tb02493.x.
Mearsheimer, John J. 2001. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. W. W. Norton & Company.
Modell, John, and Timothy Haggerty. 1991. “The Social Impact of War.” Annual Review of
Sociology 17 (1): 205–24. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.so.17.080191.001225.
Modigliani, Andre. 1972. “Hawks and Doves, Isolationism and Political Distrust: An Analysis of
Public Opinion on Military Policy*.” American Political Science Review 66 (3): 960–78.
https://doi.org/10.2307/1957488.
119
Mutz, Diana C. 2018. “Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship, Explains the 2016 Presidential
Vote.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115 (19): E4330–39.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1718155115.
Mutz, Diana C. 2018. “Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship, Explains the 2016 Presidential
V ote.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(19): E4330–39.
Myrdal, Gunnar. 1944. “An American Dilemma.” In New Tribalisms: The Resurgence of Race
and Ethnicity, edited by Michael W. Hughey, 61–72. Main Trends of the Modern World.
London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26403-2_5.
Nincic, Miroslav, and Jennifer M. Ramos. 2010. “Ideological Structure and Foreign Policy
Preferences.” Journal of Political Ideologies 15 (2): 119–41.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2010.482368.
Okihiro, Gary Y. 2014. Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture.
University of Washington Press.
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 2014. Racial Formation in the United States. Routledge.
“Once a Dark Art, Opposition Research Comes out of the Shadows for 2016 Campaigns.”
Latimes.Com. Accessed June 16, 2016. http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-opposition-
research-presidential-election-20150521-story.html.
Onion, Rebecca, and Claudio Saunt. 2014. “Interactive Time-Lapse Map Shows How the U.S.
Took More Than 1.5 Billion Acres From Native Americans.” http://www.slate.com/blogs/
the_vault/2014/06/17/interactive_map_loss_of_indian_land.html (April 25, 2020).
Page, Benjamin I. I., and Robert Y. Shapiro. 1992. The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in
Americans’ Policy Preferences. 1 edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
120
Page, Benjamin I., and Marshall M. Bouton. 2006. The Foreign Policy Disconnect: What
Americans Want from Our Leaders but Don’t Get. New edition edition. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Peress, Michael. 2010. “Securing the Base: Electoral Competition under Variable Turnout.”
Public Choice 148 (1–2): 87–104. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-010-9647-0.
Pratto, Felicia et al. 2000. “Social Dominance Orientation and the Legitimization of Inequality
Across Cultures.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 31(3): 369–409.
Pratto, Felicia, Lisa M. Stallworth, and Jim Sidanius. 1997. “The Gender Gap: Differences in
Political Attitudes and Social Dominance Orientation.” British Journal of Social
Psychology 36 (1): 49–68. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8309.1997.tb01118.x.
Ray, Bruce A. 1981. “Defense Department Spending and ‘Hawkish’ V oting in the House of
Representatives.” Western Political Quarterly 34(3): 438–46.
Reyna, Christine, P. J. Henry, William Korfmacher, and Amanda Tucker. 2006. “Examining the
Principles in Principled Conservatism: The Role of Responsibility Stereotypes as Cues
for Deservingness in Racial Policy Decisions.” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 90 (1): 109–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.1.109.
Riker, William H. 1982. “The Two-Party System and Duverger’s Law: An Essay on the History
of Political Science.” The American Political Science Review 76 (4): 753–66.
https://doi.org/10.2307/1962968.
Rodríguez-Díaz, Carlos E. 2018. “Maria in Puerto Rico: Natural Disaster in a Colonial
Archipelago.” American Journal of Public Health 108(1): 30–32.
Rosenau, James N., David C. Earnest, Yale H. Ferguson, and Ole R. Holsti. 2006. On the
Cutting Edge of Globalization: An Inquiry Into American Elites. Rowman & Littlefield.
121
Schmitt, Adam A. Powell, Nyla R. Branscombe, Michael T. 2005. “Inequality as Ingroup
Privilege or Outgroup Disadvantage: The Impact of Group Focus on Collective Guilt and
Interracial Attitudes - Adam A. Powell, Nyla R. Branscombe, Michael T. Schmitt, 2005.”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0146167204271713 (April 22, 2020).
Sidanius, James. 1993. “The Psychology of Group Conflict and the Dynamics of Oppression: A
Social Dominance Perspective.” In Explorations in Political Psychology, 183–219. Duke
Studies in Political Psychology. Durham, NC, US: Duke University Press.
Sides, John, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck. 2018. Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential
Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Simon, Rita J. 1974. Public Opinion in America, 1936-1970. Chicago: Rand McNally College
Pub. Co.
Sinclair, J. 2015. “Winning from the Center: Frank Bigelow and California’s Nonpartisan
Primary.” California Journal of Politics and Policy 7 (February). https://doi.org/10.5070/
P2CJPP7125445.
SIPRI. 2018. “Global Military Spending Remains High at $1.7 Trillion | SIPRI.” SIPRI, May 2,
2018. https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2018/global-military-spending-remains-
high-17-trillion.
Slave V oyages. 2019. “Slave V oyages.” Think Tank. Assessment & Estimates. June 30, 2019.
https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates.
Sobel, Richard. 2001. The Impact of Public Opinion on U.S. Foreign Policy since Vietnam. 1
edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
122
Starkweather, Jon, and Amanda Kay Moske. 2011. “Multinomial Logistic Regression.” Journal
of Data Science.
Stone, Walter J. 1986. “The Carryover Effect in Presidential Elections.” The American Political
Science Review 80 (1): 271–79. https://doi.org/10.2307/1957095.
“Stata Bookstore: Regression Models for Categorical Dependent Variables Using Stata, Third
Edition.” n.d. Accessed October 10, 2016. http://www.stata.com/bookstore/regression-
models-categorical-dependent-variables/.
Tatarczyk, Dawid, and Peter W Wielhouwer. 2019. “Ideology, Identity, and the Immediate:
Analyzing American Jewish Attitudes toward Israel.” International Journal of Public
Opinion Research (edz016). https://doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edz016 (April 13, 2020).
Terman, Rochelle. 2017. “Islamophobia and Media Portrayals of Muslim Women: A
Computational Text Analysis of US News Coverage.” International Studies Quarterly 0:
1–15.
Tesler, Michael. 2012. “The Spillover of Racialization into Health Care: How President Obama
Polarized Public Opinion by Racial Attitudes and Race.” American Journal of Political
Science 56 (3): 690–704. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00577.x.
Tesler, Michael. 2016. Post-Racial or Most-Racial?: Race and Politics in the Obama Era.
University of Chicago Press.
Turse, Nick. 2017. “American Special Operations Forces Are Deployed to 70 Percent of the
World’s Countries,” January 5, 2017.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/american-special-forces-are-deployed-to-70-
percent-of-the-worlds-countries/.
123
Turse, Nick. 2017. “American Special Operations Forces Are Deployed to 70 Percent of the
World’s Countries.” https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/american-special-forces-
are-deployed-to-70-percent-of-the-worlds-countries/ (April 12, 2020).
“United States Congressional Elections Results, 2012 - Ballotpedia.” n.d. Accessed June 16,
2016. https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_Congressional_elections_results,_2012.
Unzueta, Brian S. Lowery, Eric D. Knowles, Miguel M. 2007. “Framing Inequity Safely: Whites’
Motivated Perceptions of Racial Privilege - Brian S. Lowery, Eric D. Knowles, Miguel
M. Unzueta, 2007.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0146167207303016 (April 22, 2020).
Valentino, Nicholas A., and David O. Sears. 2005. “Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race
and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South.” American Journal of Political
Science 49 (3): 672–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2005.00136.x.
Verba, Sidney, Richard A. Brody, Edwin B. Parker, Norman H. Nie, Nelson W. Polsby, Paul
Ekman, and Gordon S. Black. 1967. “Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam*.”
American Political Science Review 61 (2): 317–33. https://doi.org/10.2307/1953248.
Virtanen, Simo V., and Leonie Huddy. 1998. “Old-Fashioned Racism and New Forms of Racial
Prejudice.” The Journal of Politics 60 (2): 311–32. https://doi.org/10.2307/2647911.
Ware, Alan. 2002. The American Direct Primary. Columbia University Press. https://www-
cambridge-org.libproxy1.usc.edu/core/books/the-american-direct-primary/
7DA743817D76BABCA35AB767B4194B7A.
Weiss, Antonio, and Brad Setser. 2019. “America’s Forgotten Colony.”
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/puerto-rico/2019-06-11/americas-forgotten-
colony (April 19, 2020).
124
White House. 2017. “A New National Security Strategy for a New Era.”
https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/new-national-security-strategy-new-era/.
White, Steven. 2019. “World War II and American Racial Politics: Public Opinion, the
Presidency, and Civil Rights Advocacy.” Cambridge Core. July 2019.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108596756.
Wildavksy, Aaron. 1966. “The Two Presidencies.” Trans-Action (4): 7–14.
Winter, Nicholas J.G. 2008. Dangerous Frames. University of Chicago Press.
https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo5806987.html.
Wittkopf, Eugene R. 1990. Faces of Internationalism: Public Opinion and American Foreign
Policy. Duke University Press.
Wong, Cara, and Grace E. Cho. 2005. “Two-Headed Coins or Kandinskys: White Racial
Identification.” Political Psychology 26(5): 699–720.
Zaller, John R. 1992. “The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John R. Zaller.” Cambridge
Core. August 1992. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511818691.
125
126
Appendix Contents: Chapter 2
1. Table for Iran with Ethnocentrism
2. Obama and Afghanistan
3. Full Tables for Multinomial Logits
127
Appendix Table A1 Iran and Racialization - with Ethnocentrism
128
129
Appendix Table A2 - Obama and Afghanistan
130
131
Table A3: Multinomial Regression Results for Public Opinion on U.S. Foreign Aid (Figure 8)
Increased Stay the Same Decreased
Racial Resentment -0.34*** . 0.27***
Party ID x Int/Att -0.48** . -0.07
Party ID 0.93** . 0.09
Interest/Attention 1.13*** . 0.09
Ideology (Lib-Con) -0.05 . -.12
Male 0.36* . 0.29**
Income -0.19* . 0.08
Education 0.05 . -0.17**
Age -0.09 . 0.01
Church Attendance -0.007 . -0.04
_constant -2.211* . -0.629
n=2166
Pseudo-R2 = .04
*=p<0.05 **p<0.01 ***p<0.001
132
133
Appendix Contents: Chapter 3
1. Full Regression Tables
134
Appendix Table A1 - Linked Fate and Militarism (Table 1 in Main Text)
135
136
Appendix Table 2 - White Identity and Militarism (Table 2 in Main Text)
137
138
Appendix Table 3 - Perceived Discrimination and Militarism (Table 3 in Main Text)
139
140
Abstract (if available)
Abstract
This dissertation is comprised of three essays. The central research question of Essay 1 of my dissertation, “Divisive, Polarizing, or Energizing? The Impact of Primary Competition on Candidate Strength” asks Do competitive primary elections help parties win general elections? Research in Latin American (Carey and Polga-Hecimovich 2006) shows that primary elections are associated with candidate strength in elections, yet this has not been systematically studied in U.S. legislative elections. I theorize that electoral competition in primaries will increase general election success for candidates for two different but complementary reasons. First, candidates and campaigns who engage in, and later emerge from, competitive electoral environments hone skills, create systems, and develop expertise in campaign activity. They also recruit volunteers, donors, and supporters via rigorous campaign activity which is not incentivized during non-competitive elections. Second, voters in competitive elections are more engaged, attentive, and apply higher scrutiny to their potential representatives. This means that the candidates who win competitive primaries have been means-tested in an electoral environment which will include the same constituency they will engage within the ensuing general election. This interaction between voters and candidates during competitive elections leads to the development and selection of candidates that receive more votes, and are therefore more likely to win, their general election. ❧ My findings indicate that primary elections do indeed act a benefit to candidates, which goes against conventional wisdom in American politics. Rather than assuming that the U.S. is the exception to findings from Latin America, this article finds that in U.S. elections, competitive primary elections result in a “primary bonus” for candidates who win them. Candidates who win a competitive primary, my study finds, receive a significantly larger share of the vote and are more likely to win their general election. This article is currently under review. ❧ How do race and racism impact foreign policy attitudes during elections? I explore this central research question in Essays 2 and 3. In these studies, I focus on the attitudes of the electorate, seeking to understand what motivates political choice and public opinion. I seek to apply theories from the field of race and ethnicity to the study of foreign policy opinion by Americans. Lacking knowledge or attention to foreign policy, many voters rely on heuristics to form their attitudes about U.S. military intervention, the most observable form of U.S. foreign policy. Given the centrality of race to the American political system, from slavery and colonization to contemporary inequality, I theorize that foreign policy opinion in U.S. elections is highly racialized. ❧ In Essay 2, I focus on out-group attitudes among White Americans—racism—and how they impact foreign policy beliefs. My findings demonstrate that racial resentment strongly influences the willingness of many Americans to use military force, especially against nations or peoples perceived to be non-White such as China, Iran, and potential terrorists. Partisanship, ideology, and other sociodemographic factors also play a role, but attitudes about race and racism are a major factor. Essays 3 turns to how in-group attitudes among White Americans—their racial identity—influence foreign policy beliefs. ❧ When it comes to military spending, the U.S. is exceptional among democracies in regards to how much it spends on its military. The central research question of this essay, then, is why are U.S. voters willing to spend so much money on the military? Using data from the American National Election Survey (ANES) cumulative survey (1986-2016), I examine the opinions of White Americans, finding that both outgroup attitudes like racial resentment and in group attitudes such as linked fate and racial identity strongly impact support for military spending, feelings toward the military, and the willingness to use force to solve problems in the world. Since 1986, White Americans that express stronger attachment to their racial identity and negative feelings towards racial outgroups support higher levels of military spending by the federal government. Furthermore, strong racial attitudes about both oneself and others are strongly associated with the belief that American military interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were worth the costs. Finally, racial resentment and White racial identity are strongly associated with the belief that the U.S. should use military force to protect its interests and less interested in diplomacy, human rights, economic development in foreign countries. The findings of these essays demonstrate that social identities play a key role in shaping attitudes about our most venerable political institutions and help address questions regarding why Americans are so willing to outspend the rest of the world combined on national defense. This study demonstrates that individual and group identities also play a role in motivating attitudes and behavior regarding foreign policy. White Americans, especially those with high levels of racial resentment, are more likely to favor using military force. ❧ In Essay 2 and 3, my overall theory connecting attitudes on race and racism to foreign policy beliefs derives from a combination of racial attitudes and socioeconomic factors which leads White Americans to be more likely to view the military as an institution which protects and promotes their interest and safety at home and abroad. Many White Americans are willing to support high levels of defense spending with their tax dollars and U.S. policies that result in casualties outside their socioeconomic cohort because they anticipate reaping the benefits of U.S. military policies. In large part due to the connection between race and economic prosperity, White Americans are more likely to feel invested in the conduct of U.S. military policy, whereas others may perceive themselves, or the relatives and ancestors, to be just as likely to experience the negative consequences of U.S. military policy.
Linked assets
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
Conceptually similar
PDF
Can election reforms improve democracy?
PDF
Running for office? Three different models in U.S. political campaigns & elections
PDF
Changing political attitudes and behavior in a diverse America: incorporating individual and contextual determinants
PDF
Descriptive representation in a multi-racial America
PDF
Local votes and outside money: campaign contribution geographic origins and their impact on Los Angeles City Council election outcomes
PDF
La eleccion de la pandemia: analyzing Latino political behavior during the 2020 election
PDF
The political psychology of scarcity in American society: a study of culture, discourse, and public opinion
PDF
Signaling identity: how race and gender shape what representatives say online
PDF
International politics and domestic institutional change: the rise of executive war-making autonomy in the United States
PDF
Challenges from below: the origins of status competitions in world politics
PDF
Adversaries and statecraft: explaining U.S. foreign policy toward rogue states
PDF
Diverging pathways to citizenship and immigrant integration in the U.S.
PDF
The origins and evolution of the U.S. alliance network: how military allies transform and transact
PDF
Pernicious racism and the impacts of intentional racist in a color-blind society
PDF
Voter engagement in the 2020 presidential election: what we can learn from the voter engagement initiatives in California-based and national nonpartisan organizations to increase voter participation
PDF
Examining tobacco regulation opinions and policy acceptance among key opinion leaders and tobacco retailers in low socioeconomic status African American, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic White communities
PDF
Social policy and presidential ideology in Latin America: the political economy of social spending and anti-poverty programs
PDF
Let us fake out a frontier: dissent and the settler colonial imaginary in U.S. literature after 1945
PDF
Flinging the boomerang: locating instability and the threat potential of identity-bias in US national security policy
PDF
The progressive dilemma: grassroots liberals, the Democratic Party, and the search for political power in mid-twentieth century America
Asset Metadata
Creator
Ebner, David B.
(author)
Core Title
Politics is something we do together: identity and institutions in U.S. elections
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Political Science and International Relations
Publication Date
07/27/2020
Defense Date
07/26/2020
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
Elections,Foreign policy,human rights,institutions,International relations,OAI-PMH Harvest,political behavior,primary elections,Race,U.S. Congress
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Grose, Christian (
committee chair
), Dyogi Phillips, Christian (
committee member
), Junn, Jane (
committee member
), Levy, Morris (
committee member
), Wood, Abby (
committee member
)
Creator Email
db.ebner@gmail.com,debner@usc.edu
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-340967
Unique identifier
UC11665368
Identifier
etd-EbnerDavid-8787.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-340967 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-EbnerDavid-8787.pdf
Dmrecord
340967
Document Type
Dissertation
Rights
Ebner, David B.
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Tags
political behavior
primary elections
U.S. Congress