TRENDS: Economic Interests Cause Elected Officials to Liberalize Their Racial Attitudes

• Published date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912919899725
• Date: 01 September 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912919899725

Political Research Quarterly

2020, Vol. 73(3) 511 –525

© 2020 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912919899725

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Article

In June 2015, a shooter in Charleston, South Carolina,

killed nine people in a racially motivated attack on a

church, creating an impetus to remove the Confederate flag

from the state capitol grounds. After contentious legislative

debate, Republican governor Nikki Haley signed a bill

bringing the flag down. In August 2017, white nationalists

rallied in support of a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville,

Virginia, resulting in one counter-protester being killed and

others being injured. Continued social activism against

Confederate symbols placed the issue of racially intolerant

symbols on the agenda for many U.S. elected officials who

may have preferred to avoid it.

The Confederate flag is nevertheless popular among

many white voters in the U.S. South and opposition to the

flag has often broken down on racial lines (e.g., Clark

1997; Huffmon, Knotts, and McKee 2017–2018; Husser

2017; Self 2014; Sinclair-Chapman 2018). Public officials

face a choice between alienating constituents who favor

Confederate symbols or those who consider them racially

insensitive. In many jurisdictions, Confederate flags are

displayed on public property. U.S. elected officials are

grappling with decisions to keep or remove Confederate

flags and symbols. For instance, in Mississippi, some

jurisdictions have refused to display the state flag, whose

canton is the Confederate battle flag (Bedillion 2016). In

other localities, officials reaffirmed their support for the

public display of the Confederate flag (Ristau 2017).

While the issue of removal of the Confederate flag

appears to be a racial or cultural issue, the decision to

remove these controversial symbols can also be moti-

vated by economics. Self-interested elected officials have

an incentive to remove controversial symbols and change

symbolic laws to project a welcoming environment to

outside businesses who may be interested in relocating to

their constituencies, and self-interested motivations by

public officials make them particularly susceptible to

economic arguments that could affect their constituents.

Furthermore, advocacy groups have conducted economic

boycotts of localities displaying Confederate images, and

these boycotts have the potential to drive away business

investments and conference attendance. When Governor

Nikki Haley signed the law removing the Confederate

flag from the capitol grounds in South Carolina, the

899725PRQXXX10.1177/1065912919899725Political Research QuarterlyGrose and Peterson

research-article2020

1University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

2Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, USA

Corresponding Author:

Christian R. Grose, University of Southern California, Los Angeles,

CA 90089, USA.

Email: cgrose@usc.edu

TRENDS: Economic Interests Cause

Elected Officials to Liberalize Their

Racial Attitudes

Christian R. Grose1 and Jordan Carr Peterson2

Abstract

Do attitudes of elected officials toward racial issues change when the issues are portrayed as economic? Traditionally,

scholars have presented Confederate symbols as primarily a racial issue: elites supporting their eradication from public

life tend to emphasize the association of Confederate symbols with slavery and institutionalized racism, while those

elected officials who oppose the removal of Confederate symbols often cite the heritage of white southerners. In

addition to these racial explanations, we argue that there is an economic component underlying support for removal

of Confederate symbols among political elites. Racial issues can also be economic issues, and framing a racial issue as

an economic issue can change elite attitudes. In the case of removal of Confederate symbols, the presence of such

imagery is considered harmful to business. Two survey experiments of elected officials in eleven U.S. southern states

show that framing the decision to remove Confederate symbols as good for business causes those elected officials to

favor removing the Confederate flag from public spaces. Elected officials can be susceptible to framing, just like regular

citizens.

Keywords

American politics, race, ethnicity, and politics, experiments, political elites, framing, symbolic representation, policy