Originally Posted by rhaikh
https://fair.org/home/the-tired-trope-of-blaming-trump-on-liberal-smugness/


It took me some time to get through this incoherent mess. The key premise of this article is that there is no peer-reviewed papers that support the idea that Left's actions have a polarizing effect on Right. As counter-evidence, they offer a working paper (meaning, it wasn't peer reviewed) "The Effectiveness of a Racialized Counter-Strategy" by Antoine Jevon Banks from University of Maryland.

Here is his bio:
https://gvpt.umd.edu/facultyprofile/Banks/Antoine

Looking at his CV, here is other work he published:

Banks, Antoine J. and Heather Hicks. 2016.
“Fear and Implicit Racism: Whites’ Support for Voter ID laws” Political Psychology 37(5): 641-658.

Banks, Antoine J. and Nicholas A. Valentino 2014. “What Emotions Fuel Racism in America” American Journal of Political Science Blog, July 3, 2014

and so on...

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Reading working paper that is cited by fair.org (https://www.dropbox.com/s/cufevh2ded015rh/Racialized%20Counter%20Strategy%20Draft_01_22_18.pdf?dl=0)

Abstract:
Quote
Our paper examines whether a politician charging a political candidate’s implicit racial campaign appeal as racist is an effective political strategy. According to the racial priming theory, this racialized counter-strategy should deactivate racism, thereby decreasing racially conservative whites’ support for the candidate engaged in race baiting. We propose
an alternative theory in which racial liberals, and not racially conservative whites,
are persuaded by this strategy. To test our theory, we focused on the 2016 presidential election. We ran an experiment varying the politician (by party and race) calling an implicit racial appeal by Donald Trump racist. We find that charging Trump’s campaign appeal as racist does not persuade racially conservative whites to decrease support for
Trump. Rather, it causes racially liberal whites to evaluate Trump more unfavorably. Our results hold up when attentiveness, old-fashioned racism, and partisanship are taken into account. We also reproduce our findings in two replication studies.


The cornerstone assertion of this paper is that racial priming theory is a thing. If you would like, we can have a separate discussion on this. However, to be charitable, this is a highly controversial theory with strong racist undertones. It also happens to be the kind of theory that is not falsifiable.

Reading on to methods:

Quote
We conducted an experiment through Survey Sampling International (SSI), a survey company which recruited participants to complete our study online in exchange for a variety of incentives; such as points, cash, and sweepstakes.


So it is a survey.

Quote
Participants are asked to read the article and watch the accompanying campaign ad. We created the political ad to resemble similar implicit racial appeals used in previous research... an image of young black men rioting in the streets appears on the screen.


They showed race-baiting video posing as a campaign add.

Quote
Our primary measure to capture whites’ racial attitudes is Kinder and Sander’s (1996) 4
-item Racial Resentment battery


To summarize, this is "have you stopped beating your wife" questionere. It first seen the light around Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action late 90s.

I won't bore you with critiques of statistical analysis used in the paper, but their method is inappropriate. They need to use multivariate analysis to make any kind of conclusion.

Some choice quote from results:

Quote
The findings show that racial conservatives do not feel significantly colder toward Trump after exposure to a politician’s charge of racism – relative to similar individuals in the implicit condition. In fact, resentful whites feel slightly warmer toward the Republican presidential candidate – though this difference does not reach conventional levels of statistical significance. This finding runs counter to the racial priming theory.


Quote
Racial liberals, in the explicit politician condition, are less likely to report voting for Trump relative to those in the implicit condition, but this difference is not statistically significant.


Then why are they talking about these differences?! A significant portion of this paper is "we didn't find statistically significant" and then proceed to talk about what it would mean if they did.


TL;DR This is a survey study that showed a fake racially-charged ad to a set of white people, asked them to self-identify on political spectrum, then used questionable method to measure effects of such ad. After that, questionable statistics were used to not find much of anything. From there, conclusions not supported by reported findings were reached.









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