#politicalcommunicationsowhite: Race and Politics in Nine Communication Journals, 1991-2021

ABSTRACT

Race has been a consequential factor in politics for centuries, yet our review of the political communication literature finds only sporadic interest in the topic. To examine systematically how and how much political communication research has addressed race, we analyze author-supplied keywords in nine journals within three broad categories (political communication, generalist communication, and critical communication) over 31 years. Combining computational methods and traditional content analysis, we find that political communication and generalist journals engaged with race substantially less than critical journals, and that this level of engagement has remained essentially flat since the mid-1990s. Political communication journals discussed racism least among the three journal types, and specific political communication theories appeared rarely across the board. Finally, addressing race did not predict journal impact factor.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• political communication
• critical theory
• bibliometrics
• author keywords

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability

Some of the data used in this study cannot be shared openly due to a clause in the data provider’s terms of service. The data we are allowed to share, along with instructions on how to access the proprietary data, can be accessed via the following https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/QF4AC.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Materials. The materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/QF4AC.

Notes

1. In addition, we also consider terms related to Islam (“Muslim,” “Allah,” etc.) as racialized in a way that other religions such as Christianity are not, consistent with relevant research (e.g. Galonnier, 2015; Gotanda, 2011).

2. While the generalist category contains nearly three times as many keywords as the other two, all three samples share roughly comparable statistical distributions. For example, the respective percentages of unique keywords appearing more than once per category are 19.4% for generalist, 22.7% for critical, and 25.9% for political communication.

3. When adjusted for the total number of articles in each category, these numbers are 0.04 for political communication, 0.09 for generalist, and 0.12 for critical.

4. Some, but not all, instances of the keyword “African” emerge as artifacts of the unigram-bigram process we applied to extract keywords from the article titles of the two generalist journals that only began requiring author keywords in 2015. Any instance of the bigram “African American” would have also generated the unigrams “African” and “American.” We believe the advantages of this approach outweigh its disadvantages.

Additional information

Funding

 

Notes on contributors

Deen Freelon

Deen Freelon is an associate professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Meredith L. Pruden

Meredith L. Pruden is an assistant professor at the School of Communication and Media at Kennesaw State University.

Daniel Malmer

Daniel Malmer is a Ph.D. student in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.