The Effect of News Coverage Celebrating Inclusion in Congress

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Principal investigators:

Nicole Huffman

Stony Brook University

Email: nicole.huffman@stonybrook.edu

Homepage: https://www.huffmannicole.com/

Lauren Palladino

University of Pennsylvania

Email: lrpall@sas.upenn.edu

Homepage: https://www.laurenpalladino.com/


Sample size: 1607

Field period: 08/04/2022-11/22/2022

Abstract
After each election, many news stories highlight how the United States Congress is becoming increasingly racially and ethnically diverse and now has a higher proportion of women than any point in history. However, little is known about the effect of this type of news coverage on citizens' attitudes toward Congress and democracy as a whole. While some suggest that this coverage would diminish legitimacy and support for democratic norms, other research suggests that as descriptive representation increases, citizens perceive more legitimacy and have more trust in institutions, even to dominant group members. In response to these competing bodies of literature, we conduct a vignette experiment to determine the effects of describing Congress as diverse on perceived legitimacy and commitment to democratic norms about constraining executive power. We theorize that as Congress diversifies faster than the Executive branch, perceived legitimacy of Congress as well as commitment to democratic norms restraining Presidential power may degrade, as individuals will want to consolidate power in the whitest, malest branch of government to protect the racial gender hierarchy from the threat of diversification. We expect heterogeneous effects across racial attitudes, which we use partisanship as a proxy for.
Hypotheses

RQ: How does news coverage describing the diversity of Congress affect the perceived procedural legitimacy of Congress and desire for Congress to have power?

H1: Highlighting the diversity of Congress will decrease its perceived legitimacy

H2: Highlighting the diversity of Congress will increase support for a strong executive

H3: The relationship described in H1 and H2 will be stronger for Republicans than Democrats

Experimental Manipulations
Participants will be randomly assigned to two conditions. Each condition contains an image as well as a brief description of Congress. The control states that Congress will be working on many important issues, while the treatment condition additionally describes Congress as the most diverse in history. In the control, the picture shows almost all white male Congressmen. In the treatment condition, the picture shows women and racial minorities Congresspeople.
Outcomes

Procedural Legitimacy
1. Congress can be trusted make decisions that are right for citizens (Agree strongly to Disagree strongly scale)
2. Thinking about the racial and gender composition of Congress, how fair will decision
making processes be on important issues? (Very fair to Very unfair scale)

Strong Executive
1. When the country is in great danger, it is often necessary for Presidents to act boldly, even if this means overstepping the usual processes of government decision-making (Agree strongly to Disagree strongly scale)
2. U.S. presidents should work on the country’s problems without paying attention to what Congress and the courts say (Agree strongly to Disagree strongly scale)
3. The executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government should keep one another from having too much power (Agree strongly to Disagree strongly scale)

Summary of Results

H1: Contrary to expectations, highlighting the diversity of Congress increased its legitimacy (p<0.01)

H2: There was no treatment effect on support for a strong executive at the expense of other branches.

H3: The effect in H1 is driven by Democrats. The effect is null for Republicans. The null effect for H2 is consistent across parties.