9 - Conclusion: Implicit Attitudes and Explicit Politics

Summary

We have arrived at the end of my investigative journey, as it were. But what is one to conclude from the various layers of results paraded across the previous chapters? The lessons are many. The objective behind this concluding chapter, therefore, is to bring order to this potentially unwieldy prospect by discussing the larger meaning of implicit attitudes for the study of immigration politics, specifically, and non-immigration politics, more generally. To effectively accomplish this task, I revisit – ever so briefly – the primary theoretical current running through this book, and the main tributaries of evidence on which it now draws. Against this backdrop, I discuss the implications of these findings for political scientists, especially those who study mass public opinion. This discussion forms the core of this chapter, and I organize it around five main points.

First, I consider what my results suggest about the nature of public opposition to illegal and legal immigration, given the indelible role played by implicit attitudes toward Latinos in contemporary times. Second, I clarify how and why the evidence in this book establishes the viability of implicit attitudes and their corresponding measures for political science research. Third, I discuss the connection between implicit attitudes and ongoing debates over the nature of public opinion. Fourth, I explain the relationship between implicit attitudes and the idealized democratic citizen. And fifth, I spell out the implications of implicit attitudes for the political prospects of immigration reforms. Let's begin this effort by first reviewing my claims and evidence.

Bottom Lines

I defined implicit attitudes as basic affective evaluations of political objects. As such, they reflect citizens’ learned but unspoken judgments of political objects as good or bad, favorable or unfavorable, or pleasant or unpleasant. I explained that implicit attitudes are steeped in automaticity. They are spontaneously activated, hard to control, and can operate outside of immediate awareness.

Implicit attitudes, I pointed out, arise from people's mental capacity for associative reasoning. Even as part of our mind deliberates and reflects on political information, another part of our brain is engaged in identifying broad, but stable representations of what is typical in our environments. This part of our mind is geared toward uncovering, learning, and storing recurring patterns in information we encounter. And it is based on these patterns that we develop implicit attitudes toward political objects.