Media and the power of naming: An experimental study of racist, xenophobic and nationalist party labels

Abstract

Racism has been widely discredited in past decades, and opinions that are perceived to be in conflict with the anti-racist norm are considered improper. Therefore, the anti-racist norm arguably represents an obstacle for anti-immigration parties. They must ensure that their criticism is not perceived as racism since that threatens to delegitimize the party and thereby undermine its possibilities for electoral success. The idea of the study is that the existence of the anti-racist norm make descriptions of these parties by the media decisive: the stronger connection to racism, the more severe the parties’ violation of the anti-racist norm is perceived by the public, which make voters less inclined to vote for them. This hypothesis is experimentally tested by labelling a fictive party differently and the result supports the basic idea of the study albeit the ‘racist’ label itself surprisingly does not decrease support more than the label of xenophobia.