Jon Hurwitz’s research while affiliated with University of Pittsburgh and other places

To date, little is known about the precise impact of racially coded words and phrases. Instead, most of what we know about racialized messages comes from studies that focus on pictorial racial cues (for example, the infamous “Willie Horton” ad) or on messages with an extensive textual narrative that is laced with implicit racial cues. Because in a “post-Horton” era strategic use of racially coded words will often be far more subtle than those explored in past studies, we investigate the power of a single phrase believed by many to carry strong racial connotations: “inner city.” We do so by embedding an experiment in a national survey of whites, where a random half of respondents was asked whether they support spending money for prisons (versus antipoverty programs) to lock up “violent criminals,” while the other half was asked about “violent inner city criminals.” Consistent with the literature on issue framing, we find that whites’ racial attitudes (for example, racial stereotypes) were much more important in shaping preferences for punitive policies when they receive the racially coded, “inner city” question. Our results demonstrate how easy it is to continue “playing the race card” in the post–Willie Horton era, as well as some of the limits of such framing effects among whites with more positive racial attitudes.

Past studies have found evidence of a connection between race and crime in the minds of many white Americans, but several gaps remain in our knowledge of this association. Here, a multimethod approach was used to examine more closely the racial component of whites’ support for ostensibly race-neutral crime policies. Conventional correlational analysis showed that negative stereotypes of African Americans—specifically, the belief that blacks are violent and lazy—are an important source of support for punitive policies such as the death penalty and longer prison terms. A survey experiment further showed that negative evaluations of black prisoners are much more strongly tied to support for punitive policies than are negative evaluations of white prisoners. These findings suggest that when many whites think of punitive crime policies to deal with violent offenders, they are thinking of black offenders.

Political intolerance has typically been conceptualized as an unwillingness to extend expressive rights to disliked groups or individuals. One problem with this conceptualization is that, when a given percentage of individuals in a polity is found to be intolerant, it is not known if these respondents are intolerant because of the act or because of the actor. We conceptualize intolerance multidimensionally, making a distinction between generic and discriminatory intolerance; while the former stems from an unwillingness to permit the expressive act (such as holding a rally) regardless of the actor, the latter is reserved for an unwillingness to permit the act only when performed by a noxious group. Using data from the Multi-Investigator II Study (a national telephone survey of adults in the United States), we employed a split ballot technique to decompose the total proportion of intolerant respondents into groups whose intolerance stems from an aversion to the actor (discriminatory) versus those whose intolerance stems from an aversion to the act (generic). We further explored the genesis of intolerance, finding that the two types we identified stem from different antecedents.

In the preceding argument, Miller and his colleagues leveled strong charges against our multiple values approach to the study of political intolerance. Distilled to its essence, their critique focused on three elements our study: (1) they claimed an inability to replicate our results; (2) they challenged the appropriateness of our measurement protocol; and (3) they raised more general problems with research on political tolerance. In this our rejoinder, we show, first, that any problems Miller et al. experienced in replicating our results are of a trivial nature: generally speaking, our findings are robust and may be replicated freely by interested readers by visiting our web-site where both the data for the analysis and our statistical program are posted. Second, Miller et al.'s evidence concerning the weakness of our value measures is based on a fundamentally flawed analysis. And third, the authors' more sweeping criticisms of political tolerance research, as well as their specific criticisms of our study, suffer from a limited understanding of existing theory and research in the area. We take up each of Miller et al.'s criticisms in turn.

While students of political tolerance often view tolerance decisions as a trade-off between opposing values (civil liberties versus other values), there have been few explicit attempts to formulate and test such a multiple-values model. With rare exception, researchers typically examine linkages between tolerance judgments and a single value constellation (civil liberties or general norms of democracy) without examining directly the way people rank competing values. In this essay, we use data from a national telephone survey to test a model of how various value trade-off measures (e.g., value conflict) influence citizens' initial tolerance decisions, as well as their willingness to stick to that judgment in the face of counter-arguments (i.e., the pliability of the initial baseline judgment). We find that while value conflict is often associated with greater political forbearance of disliked groups (e.g., the Klan, flag burners), greater conflict also makes individuals more susceptible to counter-arguments. We also find that when people are presented with roughly equal counterarguments, the tolerant are much more willing to abandon their initial judgment than the intolerant. We conclude with a discussion of the broader implications of our findings for the study of political tolerance and political values.

Our investigation of the antecedents and consequences of citizens' beliefs about the fairness of the criminal justice system among blacks and whites is motivated by three related concerns: 1) research showing that beliefs about procedural fairness (even more than assessments of outcomes) play a crucial role in shaping political attitudes and behavior, 2) the apparent widespread lack of confidence in the justice system expressed by both races, and 3) the historically high levels of perceived injustice and unfairness among African Americans. We report the results of a specially-commissioned national survey of whites and blacks that focuses on the chasm that exists between the races in their assessments of the criminal justice system. Three principal findings emerge from our study of the perceived fairness of the CJS: 1) race is the dominant fault line in evaluations of the CJS, with African Americans being much less likely to view the justice system (i.e., the police, the courts and the system in general) as fair than whites; 2) blacks who report being treated unfairly by the police in traffic incidents are substantially more likely to rate the justice system as unfair; and 3) based on our analysis of survey experiments where we manipulated the race of the victim in a police brutality case and the race of the suspects in a police drug search, fairness judgments play a powerful role in shaping interpretations of police behavior, particularly when blacks are the possible target of discrimination.

Where tolerance is defined as a person's willingness to put up with political expression that the person finds objectionable, we see three prerequisites for tolerance. The person must support the general right of political expression, the general right of people to engage in the particular acts under consideration, and finally the right of members of even objectionable groups to engage in those specific acts. Many past studies of tolerance proceed directly from the first of these prerequisites to the third, and, in doing so, fail to distinguish between general attitudes regarding particular acts of expression (i.e., does the survey respondent support the right of people in general to hold public rallies) and attitudes regarding particular groups engaged in those same acts (i.e., does the respondent support the right of Communists or militia groups to hold public rallies). The consequence is ambiguity in interpretation of the meaning and etiology of tolerance, and in cross-national comparison. We demonstrate our concerns using data from a split-ballot survey conducted in Romania. Results reveal that accurate interpretation of Romanians' tolerance of the right of ethnic Hungarians to engage in various acts of political expression requires attention to respondents' general attitudes regarding those same acts.