Article contents
The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality By Tali Mendelberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 320p. $52.50 cloth, $17.95 paper.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 November 2002
Extract
Tali Mendelberg's The Race Card offers a methodologically rich and convincing account of the impact of subtle race cues in contemporary American politics. Although her thesis is a controversial one, Mendelberg develops a careful and cogent argument that racial attitudes can have a substantial effect on candidate evaluations—provided that candidates craft a racial appeal that appears to be about something other than race. She argues that the success of implicit antiblack appeals, ones juxtaposing visual references to race with ostensibly nonracial verbal messages on issues such as crime or welfare, are due to four “A” factors: ambivalence about racial stereotypes, accessibility and priming, awareness of one's reliance on racial attitudes, and the ambiguity of the racial cue.
- Type
- Book Review
- Information
- Copyright
- © 2002 by the American Political Science Association
- 1
- Cited by
Comments
No Comments have been published for this article.