Neighboring Groups and Political Attacks

Explicit racism in political campaigns is rising, with politicians openly disparaging immigrant, racial, and religious minorities. Group membership plays a central role in politics, and people often respond more strongly to attacks on their own group than others. What if the attack is directed toward a group that an individual does not belong to, but with which they have a logical, social, or psychological connection? We call these "neighboring" groups. We use survey experiments with immigrant and non-immigrant Latino Americans and South Asian Canadians to understand the effect of exposure to campaign videos that disparage immigrants or Latinos/South Asians. Members of neighboring groups report emotions and candidate evaluations that are very similar to those of directly targeted groups. These findings point to the importance of neighboring groups and suggest that social and psychological connections can produce effects as large as actual group membership.