Race and Ethnicity as Foundational Forces in Political Communication: Special Issue Introduction

ABSTRACT

Despite the centrality of race and ethnicity in social and political life, they are often absent from studies of the urgent questions in contemporary political communication research. In this essay introducing a special issue focused on “Race and Ethnicity as Foundational Forces in Political Communication,” we examine factors that may contribute to the relative absence of race/ethnicity in the political communication scholarship, including: 1) structural inequalities in the field, 2) contested conceptualizations of race, and 3) the domination of certain epistemological and methodological traditions. We introduce the articles in this issue as a means of moving toward a richer integration of race/ethnicity into the field’s “big questions” and expanding the boundaries of the field itself. In making a case for a more robust conversation about race and ethnicity in political communication, we note crucial areas for self-reflection, debate, and inspiration.

KEYWORDS:

• Race and ethnicity
• political communication
• interdisciplinarity
• meta-research
• systemic inequality

This special issue was inspired by a sense that race and ethnicity are increasingly central to our lived experiences of politics yet are often absent from studies of urgent questions in contemporary political communication. As junior researchers interested in race and digital politics, we have often searched for theory and scholarship that place race at the center of the phenomena we study (e.g., Coles & Saleem, 2021; Lane et al., 2021). Yet, as we have attended conference panels on “big questions” in political communication and read handbooks on political communication research, we have found these concepts infrequently mentioned and rarely foregrounded.¹ These absences are striking, given the way race and ethnicity so profoundly shape the political and social realities of people around the globe. As others have observed, a political communication that lacks a deep theorization of how political power is connected to race, identity, and culture is wholly unprepared to study the world as it is (Chakravartty et al., 2018; George, 2022; Kreiss et al., 2017; Phelan & Maeseele, 2023).

Luckily, we exist in highly interdisciplinary spaces where theories and perspectives from across the social sciences and humanities are available to us. We have also found rich conversations about race and political communication in the nooks and crannies of our own disciplines – indeed, the presence of amazing scholars doing this work made this special issue possible. However, we have come to the conclusion, shared by many within our field, that we are woefully behind in our integration of race and ethnicity as foundational forces in political communication (Kreiss & McGregor, 2023; Lawrence, 2023).

This sentiment motivates this special issue’s goal of not simply assembling articles on the topic of race and ethnicity, but catalyzing more challenging conversations about how race and ethnicity can and should be integrated into the core of global political communication scholarship. To this end, we examine two questions to introduce the articles in this special issue: 1) What explains the current place of race/ethnicity in political communication research? and 2) How can the field move toward richer and more generative integration of race/ethnicity into its “big questions?”

How Did We Get Here?

As Smith (2004) noted, disciplines like political science have historically moved from treating race through an explicitly racist lens toward ambivalent neglect. Across other social sciences (e.g., psychology), race and identity are often considered as niche topics, rarely featured in top-tier journals (Roberts et al., 2020). In their contribution to this special issue, Freelon and colleagues illustrate that this type of neglect is at work in political communication research. In their analysis of the published literature, they find that publication rates of race-centric articles have remained consistently low over the last three decades, despite events of the past 15 years that have thrust race and racism to the very forefront of politics (e.g., the elections and presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump and protests over race and immigration globally). Further, the western-dominated political communication literature has given even less attention to the role of race and ethnicity in contexts outside the U.S. where the majority of the world’s population lives (Chakravartty et al., 2018; George, 2022).

Critical voices of these types of observations may ask, “so what?” Why should race and ethnicity be focal in political communication in the first place? This question is unavoidable, given that scholarship on race has become swept up in larger cultural struggles over speech, group status, and justice (Cammaerts, 2022). Although we are unable to offer a detailed discussion of this question in this short essay, we would note that the scientific evidence for the centrality of race and ethnicity in social and political life is overwhelming (see Hutchings & Valentino, 2004; Richeson & Sommers, 2016). As social scientists, this gap between the evidence of this phenomenon’s significance and our field’s attention to it requires us to ask the exact opposite of this question: why hasn’t race/ethnicity been studied more deeply in political communication research?²

Considering this question is an important first step in any renewed conversations about race/ethnicity in our field. Accordingly, we argue that the current status of the research might be helpfully explained by three factors: 1) structural inequalities in the field, 2) contested conceptualizations of race, and 3) domination of certain epistemological and methodological traditions. We consider each briefly, before turning to how contributions to this issue move the conversation forward.

Structural Inequalities

First, broader social, economic, and racial inequities likely create structural barriers to more race-centric political communication research. Chakravartty et al. (2018) called attention to how scholarship in the communication field normalizes whiteness and how current citational practices stymie engagement of race as an object of study in communication. These trends are partly attributed to inequalities in how academics are trained, hired, published, and cited (Freelon, Pruden, Eddy, et al., 2023; National Center for Education Statistics, 2022). Many have argued that because scholars from marginalized racial/ethnic groups have lived experiences that motivate them to study race/ethnicity, their absence from the field may help explain the lack of race-centric studies (Chakravartty et al., 2018; Freelon, Pruden, Eddy, et al., 2023; Freelon, Pruden, & Malmer, 2023). More broadly, the lack of studies that center race/ethnicity may stem from barriers that exclude certain scholars or forms of scholarship from the discipline (Harbin, 2021).

Contested Conceptualizations of Race

Relatedly, the conceptual nature of race and ethnicity are deeply contested within and across fields. Although race was originally conceived of as an essential biological trait – a position which was foundational to the scientific racism of the twentieth century – the social sciences have moved toward studying race as socially constructed, malleable, and historically situated (Richeson & Sommers, 2016). This type of complex theorization of race has not proven easily compatible with canonical political communication theories. This may have to do with political communication’s focus on elites and institutions, from which racial minorities have been systematically excluded (Wilson, 1985) or from the field’s behaviorist roots, which focus on short term psychological effects rather than broader sociological accounts (Karpf et al., 2015). This disciplinary history may lead scholars to view race/ethnicity as factors to control for while they study their primary theoretical process.

Overall, these explanations highlight the argument put forth by Smith (2004): that race has often been conceptualized as fundamentally exogenous to politics. That is, race and ethnicity function as pre-political independent variables that shape more general political processes (Taylor, 1996). When race or ethnicity do arise in political communication studies, they are often assumed to be fixed characteristics of individuals (i.e., demographics) that condition the primary political communication process of interest. It is important to note that there are counterexamples to this, where scholars offer rich accounts of how race and ethnicity are profoundly political and central to political communication (see Freelon, Pruden, & Malmer, 2023). However, this work is relatively sparse and must be read against the backdrop of a field where race/ethnicity are conceptually peripheral. Conceiving of race as a force operating on political communication from the outside has made it difficult to see the more fundamental role it plays (Kreiss et al., 2017).

Epistemological and Methodological Traditions

Finally, political communication has been dominated by specific epistemological and methodological orientations that may hamper deep theoretical integration of race/ethnicity. Like its parent fields of communication and political science, political communication has largely adopted a functionalist paradigm, particularly one that prioritizes post-positivist, Western-centric scientific practices (Baym, 2016; Delli Carpini, 2013; Phelan & Maeseele, 2023). There are two reasons that the dominance of this paradigm is problematic for race-centric political communication research. First, although the dominant paradigm acknowledges the role of power (e.g., of political, economic, and media elites who transmit messages to the masses; Baym, 2016), rarely does it engage race/ethnicity as forces acting within and being shaped by political, economic, and media systems.³ Ignoring race as a system of power that is intertwined with politics often results in a misdiagnosis of the central problems plaguing political systems (Kreiss & McGregor, 2023). The epistemological orientation of the field is also not easily compatible with critical scholarship, which has paid more attention to race and racism as objects of focus (Freelon, Pruden, & Malmer, 2023). Per Karpf et al. (2015), epistemological and methodological orientations shape “the very questions [researchers] ask, the answers they provide, and the theories they develop” (p. 1889). This is true not just regarding a scholar’s attention to race/ethnicity as objects of research, but also in terms of what objects and sites of research are considered “political” in the first place (Delli Carpini, 2014; Phelan & Maeseele, 2023).

Second, a purely quantitative methodological approach, particularly one heavily focused on “value-neutral observation” and isolation of individual-level processes (Baym, 2016), may be inadequate for studying phenomena as contextual as race/ethnicity. The aforementioned contestation of racial boundaries affects not only how participants engage in social categorization (e.g., d’Urso, 2022), but also researchers’ decisions related to data collection and analysis (Klar et al., 2020). We note this not simply to relitigate long-standing methodological and epistemological debates. Rather, we argue that employment of multiple methods and epistemologies are likely needed to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the role of race and ethnicity within political communication (Delli Carpini, 2013).

Renewing the Conversation (Contributions to This Special Issue)

Each contribution to this special issue offers a response to the status quo outlined above. In doing so, these papers serve four broader aims of the special issue. First, several articles are centered in studies of the field’s “big questions.” This illustrates how topics of intense scholarly interest (e.g., misinformation, news coverage, political trust), which are typically studied in race-neutral ways, can be more deeply understood by the theoretical centering of racial/ethnic identity. Second, contributions demonstrate how theorizing racial identities as endogenous to and dynamically connected with politics can reveal important and under-explored contexts for political communication (e.g., politically relevant entertainment media; Harbin, 2023). Third, the issue as a whole showcases how a diversity of scholarly identities, research methods, and theoretical traditions afford deeper integration of race/ethnicity into political communication studies. As an example, the methods employed in this issue include literature analyses; ethnography, interviews, and focus groups; discourse analyses; computational content analyses of media texts; and experiments. This demonstrates that dominant and non-dominant methods can be put into productive conversation with one another to study race/ethnicity in political communication. Finally, each of these articles raise new critiques, limitations, and fruitful points of departure for future conversations about race/ethnicity in the field. In introducing each article, we highlight contributions to these larger goals.

As we have already noted, Freelon, Pruden, and Malmer (2023) set the stage for the special issue by offering a systematic analysis of how (in)frequently political communication journals have published articles about race. Using both computational methods and human-coded content analysis techniques, the authors illustrate that political and generalist communication journals publish fewer articles about race and racism as core topics compared to critical journals, a trend that is robust over time. Further, their analysis shows the political communication literature appears to rarely engage major social scientific theories of race (e.g., symbolic racism, racial resentment) or critical theories. Not only does this article provide vital context for absences of race/ethnicity in the field, but it highlights the fruitfulness of reaching beyond disciplinary boundaries to subfields (e.g., critical research) where vibrant conversations about race/ethnicity in politics are already underway. The authors make a strong case for integration of race/ethnicity in the field’s core topics of study (e.g., misinformation, advertising).

The next three articles in this special issue answer Freelon, Pruden, and Malmer (2023) call to place race and ethnicity at the center of “big questions” in political communication. Müller et al. (2023) present a groundbreaking semi-supervised machine learning approach for detecting stigmatization of ethnic and religious groups in news coverage from Germany, where explicit mentions of race are taboo. Echoing Freelon, Pruden, and Malmer (2023) call for theoretical pluralism, Müller et al. import theories of implicit and explicit racism into the study of news content – one of political communication’s most enduring topics of study. In a computational content analysis of nearly 700,000 German news articles, they find differences in the amount of implicit and explicit prejudice against various ethnic and religious groups depending on group factors such as wealth of the associated country, cultural distance, and the prevalence of the group within Germany. These findings bring attention to the importance of cultural context in race/ethnicity research – including racialization of religious and immigrant identities – and present exciting new approaches to measuring racism at scale.

Next, Nguyễn et al. (2023) address the fervently researched topic of mis/dis-information in a qualitative study of the transnational spread of problematic political information within the Vietnamese American diaspora. This article illustrates how the phenomena of mis/dis-information within immigrant communities is shaped by factors such as history, geography, and collective memory. By conducting focus groups with Vietnamese Americans across two generations, the authors offer a rich portrait of intergenerational divides in how Vietnamese Americans seek, share, and make sense of political information. This study makes a compelling case for studying political communication as an intragroup process, by theorizing the role of “intergenerational information brokers” in communities like the Vietnamese American community. The authors also make a more pragmatic argument for what mis/dis-information research misses when it fails to recognize that people encounter and make sense of politics within their racial and ethnic groups.

Zárate (2023) takes on another topic of long-standing concern for political communication scholars: political trust. His article investigates the phenomenon of “Hispandering,” in which political candidates use Spanish-language appeals to build support among Hispanics – a group with traditionally low political trust. An initial experiment finds that Anglo candidates are perceived by Hispanic participants as pandering less when they speak Spanish as compared to English, with stronger effects for when they speak native sounding Spanish. Conversely, Hispanic candidates are perceived as pandering more when they speak non-native sounding Spanish as compared to English or native-sounding Spanish. In a second experiment, Zárate demonstrates that pandering can lead to decreased political trust. Importantly, Zárate illustrates the central role language plays in how ethnic group members form their perceptions of political candidates. This article serves as an instructive example of how theoretically centering ethnicity can help us understand political communication in increasingly ethnically diverse political systems.

The final two articles in this issue demonstrate the potential for race-centric studies to expand the boundaries of political communication research. Harbin (2023) does so through a rich exploration of narratives of racial duty on the competitive reality television series Survivor and a corresponding analysis of audience responses to the show on Twitter. This piece illustrates how Black contestants on Survivor explicitly advanced a narrative of racial duty by pointing out how race and racism affected their approach and experience as contestants. Harbin conducts an inductive thematic content analysis of tweets reacting to episodes where Black contestants shared their experiences of race and racism, which countered prevailing narratives of racial progress. She finds that viewers overwhelmingly rejected these first-hand accounts – which countered prevailing narratives of racial progress – dismissing them as “too political,” and vowing to stop watching the series. This study paints a nuanced picture of reality television as a site where narratives about race in America are constructed and contested. More broadly, Harbin demonstrates how centering race can simultaneously foreground under-researched political communication contexts (i.e., politically relevant entertainment media; Coles, 2020), while also contributing to on-going scholarly conversations. As this piece demonstrates, movements toward enhanced diversity and inclusion in American entertainment programming could lead viewers to “tune out” of these programs, in the same way they selectively avoid news content. In doing so, it stands as an example of how race-centric political communication research can be both generative and integrative.

Lastly, Grover and Kuo (2023) compel us to question the very stability of race as a social category. Their article examines how Asian American social movements use consciousness-raising activities as a means of calling into question the political nature of racial/ethnic identity. Using ethnographic fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, and archival materials, the study offers a rich exploration into how communicative spaces within social movements help participants contest racial hierarchy and build solidarity. This study demonstrates the utility of Freelon, Pruden, and Malmer (2023) call to use critical theory in political communication research by integrating critical ethnic studies and feminist studies. In contesting much of the field’s orthodoxy, this study makes a compelling case for how race is not exogenous to politics, but rather continuously constructed through political communication.

Conclusion

We conclude this introduction with a measure of self-reflection. First, although the articles in this issue cut across a multitude of groups, identities, and transnational contexts, they are still predominantly focused on American politics. On this count, we fall short of George’s (2022) call to make greater space for research outside Western contexts. As two American scholars trained in communication, our own decidedly “American” conceptualization of race likely played a limiting role. In addition, the structural barriers that we noted earlier likely influenced the international diversity of scholarship we were able to include. This highlights the need for outlets like Political Communication to continue the work of consciously foregrounding research in non-Western contexts and more honestly admitting when they fail to do so (see Lawrence, 2023).

Second, this issue raises new questions about how we conceptualize and measure race moving forward. Which of the many conceptualizations of race presented in this issue should the field adopt? How can we accurately measure racial/ethnic identity when it is either not fully visible to us (e.g., in digital contexts) or too complexly constructed? Can we use race-centric theories from other disciplines, or do we need to develop more race-centric theories specific to political communication? How can we integrate critical theories of race more deeply into the post-positivist dominated literature (see Ramasubramanian & Banjo, 2020)? When does a focus on race/ethnicity obscure other factors that shape political communication? These questions form the basis for what we hope will become sustained collective conversations.

Finally, we return to the inevitable skepticism that this type of special issue might encounter. Efforts to make race central in scholarly inquiry are often met with the accusation that “you’re making everything about race!” (e.g., Pluckrose & Lindsay, 2020). More moderate reactions might be concerned with how race/ethnicity can compete with an array of other concepts that are important in contemporary political communication environments. On these points, we feel that the articles in this issue offer a strong response. These studies highlight how race/ethnicity can be fruitfully studied from psychological, sociological, and critical perspectives. In doing so, they address topics that are already heavily studied in the field, in addition to opening up new lines of inquiry. The contributors demonstrate that centering race/ethnicity can be accomplished through methods from computational content analysis to ethnography. The fact that articles across the issue engage and challenge existing disciplinary orthodoxy – as well as one another – seems to us a sign that our field can have a spirited and inclusive conversation about when and how race/ethnicity shape the phenomena we study. Indeed, this conversation is vital if our field is to makes sense of a political world with race/ethnicity at its core.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stewart M. Coles

Stewart M. Coles (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research examines how individuals’ identities and media use, and the identities of mediated subjects, influence people’s political attitudes and behaviors.

Daniel Lane

Daniel S. Lane (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, UC Santa Barbara, where he studies how individuals and groups use communication technology to create social and political change.

Notes

1. There are a few important exceptions to this trend. One notable example was a panel titled, “Moving the Field of Political Communication Forward in Turbulent Times” presented at the 2022 ICA Conference in Paris, France. This panel discussed some of the issues addressed in this introductory essay explicitly and contributed toward its development. Dr. Regina Lawrence, editor of the journal Political Communication, also highlighted many of these issues in a 2023 editor’s note (Lawrence, 2023).

2. Here, we would emphasize that race and ethnicity are two among a diverse array of social and group identities worthy of deeper study in our field. Although this special issue focuses on the role of race/ethnicity, we hope it helps contribute to broader efforts to deeply theorize the role of other social and group identities in political communication (e.g., gender, sexuality, religion, etc.).

3. There are, of course, notable exceptions, such as Iyengar’s (1990) classic framing study on race and poverty.