Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T09:42:15.909Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Trump Effect: How 2016 Campaign Rallies Explain Spikes in Hate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2022

Ayal Feinberg ,
Regina Branton Open the ORCID record for Regina Branton [Opens in a new window]  and
Valerie Martinez-Ebers Open the ORCID record for Valerie Martinez-Ebers [Opens in a new window]
Ayal Feinberg
Affiliation:
Texas A&M University–Commerce, USA
Regina Branton
Affiliation:
University of North Texas, USA
Valerie Martinez-Ebers
Affiliation:
University of North Texas, USA
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The 2016 Trump campaign held more than 300 rallies. Our research examines whether these rallies and Trump’s rhetoric served as opportunities for the spread of hate. We measured the number of reported white-supremacist propaganda, anti-Semitic incidents, and extremist behaviors that occurred both leading up to and directly following these campaign events. We contend that Trump’s rhetoric and rallies increased the perceived threat facing white Americans, heightening their white identity, all while justifying violence and extralegal methods to address their grievances and thereby increasing reported bias incidents. We find that counties that hosted a Trump rally experienced an increase in hate-motivated events. We systematically show that Trump political rallies were associated with a limited size but significant rise in the likelihood of reported hate and bias incidents.

Type
Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , April 2022 , pp. 257 - 265
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Adamczyk, Amy, Gruenewald, Jeff, Chermak, Steven M., and Freilich, Joshua D.. 2014. “The Relationship Between Hate Groups and Far-Right Ideological Violence.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 30 (3): 310–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anti-Defamation, League. 2018. “U.S. Anti-Semitic Incidents Surged in 2016–-17.” Anti-Semitic Audit. www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/Anti-SemiticAuditPrint_vf2.pdf.Google Scholar
Banfield, Ashleigh. 2016. “Trump Rally Violence.” CNN, March 11. www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1603/11/lvab.01.html.Google Scholar
Barkun, Michael. 2017. “President Trump and the ‘Fringe.’” Terrorism and Political Violence 29 (3): 437–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baron, Reuben M., and Kenny, David A.. 1986. “The Moderator–Mediator Variable Distinction in Social Psychological Research: Conceptual, Strategic, and Statistical Considerations.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51 (6): 1173.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Black, Donald. 1983. “Crime as Social Control.” American Sociological Review 48 (1): 34–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blumenfeld, Warren J. 2016. “If Islam Is Un-American, So Are Christianity and Judaism.” Huffington Post, December 13. www.huffingtonpost.com/warren-j-blumenfeld/if-islam-unamerican-so-al_b_8789654.html.Google Scholar
Chokshi, Niraj. 2016. “Trump Accuses Clinton of Guiding Global Elite Against U.S. Working Class.” New York Times, October 13. www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/us/politics/trump-comments-linked-to-antisemitism.html.Google Scholar
Cohen, Jeffrey E. 1995. “Presidential Rhetoric and the Public Agenda.” American Journal of Political Science 39 (1): 87–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comenetz, Joshua. 2012. The National Jewish Population Map. Dataset and maps available at the North American Jewish Data Bank. www.jewishdatabank.org.Google Scholar
De Jonge, Chad K. 2016. “The Roots of Trumpismo: Populism and Pushback.” ABC News, March 13. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/roots-trumpismo-populism-pushback-poll/story?id=37602670.Google Scholar
Edwards, Griffin S., and Rushin, Stephen. 2018. “The Effect of President Trump’s Election on Hate Crimes.” Social Science Research Network. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3102652.Google Scholar
Eshbaugh-Soha, Matthew, and Peake, Jeffrey S.. 2011. Breaking Through the Noise: Presidential Leadership, Public Opinion, and the News Media. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2015. “Crime in the United States.” https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015.Google Scholar
Feinberg, Ayal K. 2020a. “Homeland Violence and Diaspora Insecurity: An Analysis of Israel and American Jewry.” Politics and Religion 13 (1): 1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feinberg, Ayal K. 2020b. “Explaining Ethnoreligious Minority Targeting: Variation in US Anti-Semitic Incidents.” Perspectives on Politics 18 (3): 770–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feinberg, Ayal, Branton, Regina, and Martinez-Ebers, Valerie. 2022. Replication data for “The Trump Effect: How 2016 Campaign Rallies Explain Spikes in Hate.” Harvard Dataverse http://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/K2LOJN.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, Donald P., Glaser, Jack, and Rich, Andrew. 1998. “From Lynching to Gay Bashing: The Elusive Connection Between Economic Conditions and Hate Crime.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75 (1): 82.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hall, Kira, Goldstein, Donna M., and Ingram, Matthew Bruce. 2016. “The Hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, Gesture, Spectacle.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 71–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, Nathan. 2014. “Understanding Hate Crimes 1: Sociological and Criminological Perspectives.” In The Routledge International Handbook on Hate Crime, ed. Hall, Nathan, Corb, Abbee, Giannasi, Paul, and John, G. D. Grieve, 69–80. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horowitz, Donald L. 1985. Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Iacus, Stefano M., King, Gary, and Porro, Giuseppe. 2012. “Causal Inference Without Balance Checking: Coarsened Exact Matching.” Political Analysis 20 (1): 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jendryke, Michael, and McClure, Stephen C.. 2019. “Mapping Crime—Hate Crimes and Hate Groups in the USA: A Spatial Analysis with Gridded Data.” Applied Geography 111:102072.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karapin, Roger. 1999. “The Politics of Immigration Control in Britain and Germany: Subnational Politicians and Social Movements.” Comparative Politics 31 (4): 423–44.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
King, Ryan D., and Sutton, Gretchen M.. 2013. “High Times for Hate Crimes: Explaining the Temporal Clustering of Hate‐Motivated Offending.” Criminology 51 (4): 871–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lajevardi, Nazita, and Oskooii, Kassra A.. 2018. “Old-Fashioned Racism, Contemporary Islamophobia, and the Isolation of Muslim Americans in the Age of Trump.” Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics 3 (1): 112–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lickel, Brian, Miller, Norman, Stenstrom, Douglas M., Denson, Thomas F., and Schmader, Toni. 2006. “Vicarious Retribution: The Role of Collective Blame in Intergroup Aggression.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10 (4): 372–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lilley, Matthew, and Wheaton, Brian. 2019. “No, Trump Rallies Didn’t Increase Hate Crimes by 226 Percent.” Reason, September 9. https://reason.com/2019/09/06/no-trump-rallies-didnt-increase-hate-crimes-by-226-percent.Google Scholar
Lombroso, Daniel, and Appelbaum, Yoni. 2016. “‘Hail Trump!’: White Nationalists Salute the President-Elect.” The Atlantic, November 21. www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/richard-spencer-speech-npi/508379.Google Scholar
Lyons, Christopher J. 2007. “Community (Dis)Organization and Racially Motivated Crime.” American Journal of Sociology 113 (3): 815–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacKinnon, David P., Krull, Jennifer L., and Lockwood, Chondra M.. 2000. “Equivalence of the Mediation, Confounding and Suppression Effect.” Prevention Science 1 (4): 173–81. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1026595011371.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Major, Brenda, Blodorn, Alison, and Blascovich, Gregory Major. 2018. “The Threat of Increasing Diversity: Why Many White Americans Support Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election.” Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 21 (6): 931–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGregor, Ian, Prentice, Mike S., and Nash, Kyle A.. 2009. “Personal Uncertainty Management by Reactive Approach Motivation.” Psychological Inquiry 20 (4): 225–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Montgomery, David. 2018. “The State of Hate.” Washington Post, November 8. www.washingtonpost.com/news/magazine/wp/2018/11/08/feature/is-the-southern-poverty-law-center-judging-hate-fairly.Google Scholar
Parks, Perry. 2019. “Covering Trump’s ‘Carnival’: A Rhetorical Alternative to ‘Objective’ Reporting.” Journalism Practice 13 (10): 1164–84. DOI:10.1080/17512786.2019.1577696.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubin, Gabriel. 2020. “Donald Trump, Twitter, and Islamophobia: The End of Dignity in Presidential Rhetoric About Terrorism.” https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1170andcontext=justice-studies-facpubs.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sanchez, Felix. 2015. “NBC and GOP, Dump Trump for His Mexico Comments (Opinion).” CNN, June 29. www.cnn.com/2015/06/27/opinions/sanchez-trump-nbcu-ties/index.html.Google Scholar
Sanchez, James C. 2018. “Trump, the KKK, and the Versatility of White Supremacy Rhetoric.” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric 8 (1): 44–56.Google Scholar
Schneiker, Andrea. 2020. “Populist Leadership: The Superhero Donald Trump as Savior in Times of Crisis.” Political Studies 68 (4): 857–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Southern Law Poverty Center. 2018. “Hate Crimes 1999–2017.” www.splcenter.org/hatemap.Google Scholar
Stephan, Walter, Diaz-Loving, Rolando, and Duran, Anne. 2000. “Integrated Threat Theory and Intercultural Attitudes: Mexico and the United States.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 31 (2): 240–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stuckey, Mary E. 2020. “The Power of the Presidency to Hurt: The Indecorous Rhetoric of Donald J. Trump and the Rhetorical Norms of Democracy.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 50 (2): 366–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tajfel, Henri, Turner, John C., Austin, William G., and Worchel, Stephen. 1979. “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict.” Organizational Identity: A Reader 56 (65): 9780203505984–16.Google Scholar
US Census Bureau. 2015. “American Community Survey.” www.census.gov/acs/www/data/data-tables-and-tools/data-profiles/2015.Google Scholar
Wood, Billy Dan. 2021. The Politics of Economic Leadership: The Causes and Consequences of Presidential Rhetoric. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Zarefsky, David. 2004. “Presidential Rhetoric and the Power of Definition.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 34 (3): 607–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Feinberg et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/K2LOJN
Link
Supplementary material: File

Feinberg et al. supplementary material

Feinberg et al. supplementary material

Download Feinberg et al. supplementary material(File)
File 137.3 KB