These two books examine important themes in one of the more dynamic aspects of American party coalitions: the complex relationship between African Americans and the Republican Party. Michael Fauntroy examines broadly the relationship's ebb and flow, emphasizing the policy, political, and rhetorical elements of the party's conflicted orientations toward the black electorate. Tasha Philpot develops a general theory of changes in party images, testing it in light of recent GOP efforts to appear more racially diverse.
Philpot develops a compelling theory of political-party image change, testing it against the backdrop of the 2000 and 2004 Republican national conventions' efforts to portray a party of racial and ethnic diversity. She analyzes media coverage of and public responses to those efforts, using multiple methodologies; the overall result is a thorough and readable book appropriate for graduate reading lists in public opinion, political parties, elections, and race and ethnicity.
Fauntroy undertakes a more comprehensive historical treatment of the relationship between African Americans and the Republican Party, examining “how the GOP's public policy positions have developed, as well as how their use of political symbolism has resulted in dismal levels of black support for the party” (p. x). The result is a balanced and nuanced discussion of race–party intersections from both groups' perspectives. The historical exposition is akin to peeling an onion; succeeding sections of the book reveal the layered complexity of the relationship and why African American suspicion of the modern Republican Party is so wide and deep. I recommend this book highly, especially to Republicans and conservatives struggling to grasp why the party cannot gain traction with the black polity. Consider this book for undergraduate courses on political parties, race and ethnicity, and electoral politics; for graduate courses and reading lists it dovetails nicely with books like James Reichley's (1992) The Life of the Parties.
Tasha Philpot's theory of party image change builds squarely on social-psychological models. One notable strength of her book is the attention paid to the intersection of party actions and individual responses, though unrealistic expectations of voters' information-processing capabilities are sometimes the result: “For each party and each issue domain, individuals will set the lower boundary for determining what signifies change when called on to revise their party images. The party's projected image will be incorporated into people's partisan stereotypes when it meets or exceeds the height of the bar for determining what constitutes a new party” (p. 19). The historical overview of the dominant African American perspective on party politics and campaign strategies is one of the better summaries I have read, though it discounts or misses alternative interpretations, as does the reiteration in Chapter 6 of the modal liberal accounts of the 2000 election, which ignores alternative legal perspectives. Longitudinal racial perceptions of the parties are augmented by fascinating focus group research, making Chapter 3 a compelling read. Chapter 4's content analysis of mainstream and African American print media coverage of the 2000 GOP convention interestingly demonstrates that “mainstream media tended to be more critical of the Republican Party than did the black media” (p. 101).
Philpot's most compelling tests of her theory are based on multivariate analyses of Gallup poll data juxtaposed with experimental research. Chapters 5 and 7 reveal that public perceptions of the Republican Party and its racial symbolism are contingent on the race of the viewer, convention exposure, and media priming. Whereas blacks were unconvinced by the GOP's image change efforts when informed that the party's policies had not changed, their party images could be “chiseled away” when primed with information that its minority outreach was ongoing (p. 142). Chapter 8 tests the theory with the 1992 Democratic national convention and with the Clinton campaign's efforts to mitigate the perception of the Democrats as uniformly liberal.
On balance, Philpot's theory is useful and generates interesting and testable hypotheses. There are some gaps that future researchers should consider. First, the theory does not articulate completely the competitive pressures against party image changes, such as Democrats' strategic imperative to maintain the party image status quo. Second, the theory says little about opinion leaders as alternative credible information sources, such as clergy in the black community. Third, the theory inadequately considers a major alternative engine of party image change: the presidential candidate. Candidate-driven presidential elections subject the parties' images to the candidates' preferences; to Philpot's examples (Bill Clinton 1992, George W. Bush 2000 and 2004) we could add John Kerry's efforts to make the 2004 Democrats appear more pro-military and Robert Dole's 1996 attempts to temper the social conservative stridency exhibited at the 1992 GOP convention.
Philpot appropriately suggests how the theory may be applied to other politically relevant groups, such as Latinos and women, to which I would add issue polities. For example, should a pro-choice candidate win the Republican nomination, a dramatic party image remaking around abortion could be in the works. The strategic implications of gaining the ideological center with that issue are significant, given the high risk of losing a hefty segment of the party's core (a theoretical possibility that Philpot addresses). This raises more general questions about party image change following real policy changes. What if one of the parties actually did change its position on abortion? Or gay marriage? How would such elite-driven changes be received by the respective parties-in-the-electorate? These circumstances would constitute fertile ground for further tests of the party image change theory.
Michael Fauntroy's first three chapters broadly sketch the Republican Party's evolution from its free soil origins to its modern internecine conflicts. He revisits early Republican pro-black policies, including a thoughtful look at the influence of the era's racial “radicals” in light of the “conflicted racial positions held by most of the GOP” (p. 29), examining in some depth the historical processes that drove blacks away from the party. His analysis allows that recent Republican outreach to black voters may be sincere, rather than merely strategic: “Current GOP efforts to increase the support it receives from African-Americans can be seen as an effort to make visible a largely forgotten or ignored portion of the electorate.” Ultimately, however, he is skeptical of the efforts' efficacy, because Republicans “either misunderstand [the role of] linked fate or seek to create a new paradigm by removing race as the linkage and replacing it with something new, such as religion” (p. 22).
Chapter 4 examines specific policy proposals and partisan, nonpartisan, and African American–led political activities designed to attract black voters to the party and to support black GOP candidates, yielding several important lessons for Republicans and their African American allies in that quest. Of course, one major reason Republican policies fail to attract black support is that they do not address problems that African Americans view as critical; Chapter 5 discusses Republican policies that have actually repelled African Americans. Substantive parallels with Philpot's analyses are in Chapter 7 (bluntly titled “GOP Political Symbolism Angers African Americans”), which explains the impact of Republicans' use of racial symbols and rhetoric in electoral campaigning and public statements. The persistence of Republican negative racial symbolism is still disturbing, underscoring African American resistance to GOP efforts to change its image, absent substantive policy adjustments, as Philpot demonstrates.
Fauntroy's historiography yields three major conclusions: the overestimation by Republicans of early GOP support for black Americans' political and social equality; the ironic misunderstanding even by African American Republicans of the ideological bases of mass black support for Democrats and opposition to Republicans; and the GOP's electoral paradox of apparently wanting to increase its minority vote shares while having to increase its share of white votes due to the nation's changing demographics and its own failure to solidify minority support.
One of the more important conclusions I drew from both books is the basic inability of Republican strategists to simply understand the black community, and their resulting inability to formulate policies and messages to earn credibility, let alone votes. The fundamental societal problem here encompasses the differences between white and black perspectives on American politics and the political system (see, e.g., Howard Schuman et al., Racial Attitudes in America, 1997); the GOP's (often self-created and self-perpetuating) problems thus reflect broader interracial misunderstanding and distrust. Republicans are right to take the initiative in building bridges across the racial and ethnic divides but cannot build the right bridges with mere rhetoric; they must engage in more transparent efforts to increase trust, including the politically risky—but morally correct—strategy of proactively repudiating politically expedient negative racial symbolism. The strategic context is problematic, of course, because Democrats benefit from the race–party status quo and Republican successes will threaten them, giving Jefferson's party the incentive to undermine even genuine GOP overtures. Still, perhaps black Americans will consider Fauntroy's suggestion that “[f]inally, now may be the time for African American voters to rethink their resistance to the GOP” (p. 3).
In this context, both books usefully contribute to our understanding of parties' political incentives to change their images and coalitions, of the conditions under which voters will respond to such efforts, and of the awkward historical dance between African Americans and the party of Lincoln.
