Elite Messages: The Role of Race as a Source Cue

I. Overview In public debate about many social issues, leading societal actors, groups, and institutions interact with a goal of shaping citizens' perceptions and outlook. In this process, a growing body of research suggests that what social and political elites say and do, and the manner in which news media report these actions, often exerts considerable influence upon citizens' opinion formation and policy evaluations A premise of this research is that while some individuals are motivated, interested, and capable of comprehensive processing of political ideas and messages many citizens, when given appropriate opportunities, use shortcuts in forming political judgments, such as relying on trusted Building upon this scholarship, this paper suggests that a nuanced understanding of elites and their influence in politics must take into account the role of source cues in citizens' information processing. Indeed, some aggregate-level research suggests that elites' partisan ties serve as important cues in the public's filtering of discourse about media and politics (Zaller, 1994; Watts et al., 1999). Virtually unexamined, however, is the potential influence of other seemingly important source characteristics of political elites — such as one's race or gender. With this in mind, this paper offers a theoretical framework that attempts to link elite discourse, source cues, and citizens' racial and political cognitions. I then report some results of an experiment in which the source of a first-person essay about race relations, presented in the context of a leading newsmagazine, was systematically altered — as written by either a white elite or black elite — within otherwise constant information environments to examine how individuals process, evaluate, and use elites' ideas and perspectives in forming political judgments. The sample consisted of undergraduate students at the University of Washington. II. A Theoretical Framework Race relations, particularly between whites and blacks in the United States, intersect with much contemporary political discourse, either manifestly in discussion of racial policies such as affirmative action or implicitly in debate about issues such as crime, welfare, immigration, and poverty. It seems reasonable, therefore, to expect that citizens have schema about race that are mentally available and, in varying degrees, "accessible" — that is, fairly easily activated and retrieved from memory in response seems likely that these constructs consist of values, such as principles of equality and personal responsibility, inter-mingled with perceptions about racial groups, particular