{"title":"How the Identity of Substance Users Shapes Public Opinion on Opioid Policy.","authors":"Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, Michael Hankinson","doi":"10.1007/s11109-022-09845-8","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>How do media portrayals of potential policy beneficiaries' identities sway public support for these policies in a public health setting? Using a pre-registered vignette experiment, we show that the racial identity of substance users depicted in news media shapes public opinion on policies to address the opioid crisis. People display biases in favor of their own racial identity group that manifest in their support for both treatment-based policies and punitive policies. We show that these biases may be moderated by the type of initial drug used by a substance user and associated levels of perceived blame. Extending theories of group politics, we also assess favoritism based on gender and residential context identities, but find no such biases. These results highlight the continued centrality of race in the formation of policy preferences.</p><p><strong>Supplementary information: </strong>The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-022-09845-8.</p>","PeriodicalId":48166,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior","volume":" ","pages":"1-21"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9765388/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Political Behavior","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09845-8","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
How do media portrayals of potential policy beneficiaries' identities sway public support for these policies in a public health setting? Using a pre-registered vignette experiment, we show that the racial identity of substance users depicted in news media shapes public opinion on policies to address the opioid crisis. People display biases in favor of their own racial identity group that manifest in their support for both treatment-based policies and punitive policies. We show that these biases may be moderated by the type of initial drug used by a substance user and associated levels of perceived blame. Extending theories of group politics, we also assess favoritism based on gender and residential context identities, but find no such biases. These results highlight the continued centrality of race in the formation of policy preferences.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-022-09845-8.
期刊介绍:
Political Behavior publishes original research in the general fields of political behavior, institutions, processes, and policies. Approaches include economic (preference structuring, bargaining), psychological (attitude formation and change, motivations, perceptions), sociological (roles, group, class), or political (decision making, coalitions, influence). Articles focus on the political behavior (conventional or unconventional) of the individual person or small group (microanalysis), or of large organizations that participate in the political process such as parties, interest groups, political action committees, governmental agencies, and mass media (macroanalysis). As an interdisciplinary journal, Political Behavior integrates various approaches across different levels of theoretical abstraction and empirical domain (contextual analysis).
Officially cited as: Polit Behav