A large body of research shows exposure to racialized media and racist campaign communication can increase the likelihood that racial attitudes influence Americans’ subsequent political evaluations. Recent political trends, however, suggest existing models may no longer adequately explain the effects of racial and racist messages among whites and non-whites alike. Of particular importance for this question is whether implicitly racial messages still prime white Americans’ racial attitudes. Additional questions considered in this chapter include the following. Do classic theories of racial priming apply to political messages about other racial, ethnic, and religious minority groups? Who is most susceptible to racial priming? When should researchers measure racial attitudes in survey experiments? How can we design racial messages that are implicit? And do identity-based appeals and attacks commonly used today still prime ethno-racial identity attachments? We synthesize debates in the extant research on racial priming, explain why experiments are the best approach for measuring racial priming effects, discuss how to overcome several design and methodological challenges facing racial priming scholars, and then propose an agenda for future research to help address a variety of outstanding questions in this increasingly important area of scholarship.

This chapter discusses the Court's free expression jurisprudence. This supports a liberal democratic conception of democracy but there are other concepts discussed also. A substantive conception comes across in some of the earlier case law on obscenity and blasphemy and more recently a substantive commitment to pluralism, tolerance and broad-mindedness is emphasised. The case law on free expression during elections and political advertising suggests a more deliberative conception of democracy, while recently there is a stronger commitment to freedom of information, essential for a participatory democracy.

This chapter reviews the data that scholars have started to assemble on the volume, content, targeting, and effect of paid online advertising in the United States. It discusses how online advertising is regulated through formal rules and shaped informally by content negotiations between advertisers and platforms. It also explains how the decentralized methods of purchasing digital ads make systematic research challenging. That said, this review (at best) provides tentative conclusions, which will be tested in earnest over the next few years. In many ways, then, we are at a precipice awaiting the flood of more systematic analyses yet to come as scholars dig into the newly available data. With that in mind, it reviews what is known at present and evaluates the information that is available through the platform archives.