Review:
"The author uses a wonderful variety of empirical data to track the evolution of political rhetoric about race from the Civil War to the present. This book has the potential to be a pioneering volume, moving beyond other accounts of how race influences mass politics in the contemporary era."--David O. Sears, University of California, Los Angeles
"This is an absolutely wonderful book--a fascinating, well-written account of the author's path-breaking research. It is controversial but convincing and will be of interest to a wide audience. . . . The book will surely make an important mark in political science, communications, and African-American studies. By all rights it should also shape the way the news media cover politics and--as a consequence--the way political campaigns are conducted. The work is both deeply rooted in well-developed research traditions and thoroughly new in what is has to offer."--Martin Gilens, Yale University
"Winner of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award"
"[A]n impressive and controversial analysis."---Scott Althaus, Harvard International Journal of Press and Politics 2002
"Winner of the 2017 Philip E. Converse Book Award, Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Section of the American Political Science Association"
"In this excellent study, Tali Mendelberg develops an original argument about the use of implicit racial appeals in political campaigns. She creatively deploys a variety of methods and offers important insights in whites' racial thinking and particularly into the ways modern politicians play upon anti-black racial prejudice and antagonism while retaining respectability. . . . The book is an important contribution to political psychology: a case study in one critical realm of politics (interracial or ethnic relations) of how affect and cognition interact with political culture, processes, incentives, and institutions to shape political behavior at both the elite and mass levels. Unusually for a study so thoroughly grounded in social science methods, the book also treats and links its arguments to the history of U.S. race relations, adding to its value."---Robert Entman, Political Psychology
"[G]roundbreaking on a number of levels and deserves attention from students of race, mass media effects, campaigns, elite behavior, and public opinion. . . It should be praised for the sheer volume of empirical evidence it presents and for the high risk of disconfirmation this poses for its central thesis. It should be read not only by those interested in the historical and contemporary role of racial appeals in modern American campaigns, but also by those seeking a model for rigorous, multimethodological, empirical social science research."---Nicholas Valentino, Public Opinion Quarterly
"Mendelberg uses historical and experimental surveys and concludes that implicit communication about race is far more prevalent today among dominant groups and far more deadly because it is less visible than the overt racism of the 1960s. Mendelberg's book is a must read. She combines normative and quantitative analysis with self-reflection."--Choice
"This book attempts something new and innovative within political science but it does so through a careful deployment of theoretical and methodological procedures acceptable to political scientists."---Andy R. Brown, Ethnic and Racial Studies
"In The Race Card, Tali Mendelberg develops a comprehensive theory of the use of implicit racial messages in election campaigns and the relative effectiveness of these messages with voters. . . . Mendelberg takes this thesis and rigorously tests it at each level of analysis. . . . [Her] work is impressive. She has grounded a comprehensive theory of implicit racial messages in the literature on public opinion, the social psychology of prejudice, and the racial character of American political parties. She provides compelling evidence from a variety of sources: experiments, analysis of survey data, and content analysis. . . . Her conclusions make a significant contribution to our understanding of how racial messages work in election campaigns. Her findings will contribute to sociologists working in the fields of race and ethnicity, mass media, and political sociology."---Matthew Schneirov, Contemporary Sociology
About the Author:
Tali Mendelberg is Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.