More than 25 years ago in A Discipline Divided (Almond Reference Almond1989), Gabriel Almond expressed concern that political scientists sat at “separate tables.” The problem, he argued, was that increased specialization in the discipline had ushered in an era of narrowness of training and interest, so that addressing significant problems of human organization, power, and governance would be compromised, by political scientists refusing to—or, worse, unable to—interact with one another. One can reasonably argue that a quarter century later, conditions have not improved in the discipline. Against this backdrop, though, is a degree of interdisciplinarity that, as we extend the metaphor, has the potential to bridge not only tables, but entire cafeterias.
It is within this context that Efrén O. Pérez offers Unspoken Politics. For behavioralist scholars versed in The American Voter (Campbell et al. Reference Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes1960), Unspoken Politics is certainly not the first volume to apply psychological principles to political science questions, but it stands as one of the most comprehensive, rigorous, and bold applications to appear in recent decades. On the surface, it appears that Pérez wants us to more fully understand how nonconscious thoughts affect policy preferences (specifically toward the issue of immigration), but a careful read reveals that his intentions are actually more ambitious: Pérez wants political scientists—particularly behavioralists—to visit and learn from the contemporary tables of social psychologists, cognitive psychologists, and social neuroscientists, a synthesis promising both substantive and methodological benefits. Pérez shows clearly and persuasively throughout the book just how important those benefits can be.
Public opinion researchers have long lamented a necessary compromise of their craft: though the desire is to measure attitudes, all we can really capture are opinions. This conceptual difference is rooted in our understanding of consciousness, as well as the methodological restrictions that constrain all social scientists. We want to measure what people think, yet all we can measure is what people tell us (or show us) they think. As troublesome as this is in general, it is particularly problematic when the subject of interest has a clear normative social proscription. For decades, sociologists, social psychologists, and political scientists worked to devise creative questions to measure levels and types of racial attitudes without triggering what Mendelberg (Reference Mendelberg2001) referred to as the norm of equality. Among the most notable and durable of these were McConahay's modern racism scale (Reference McConahay, Dovidio and Gaertner1986), and Henry and Sears’ symbolic racism scale (Reference Henry and Sears2002). Advances in technology and conceptual clarity led to the Implicit Associations Test (IAT) from Greenwald et al. (Reference Greenwald, McGhee and Schwartz1998)—upon which rest the bulk of Pérez's arguments and analysis. With this approach (not to mention emerging promises of psychophysiological methods such as fMRI, electroencephalography, galvanic skin response and cortisol analysis), researchers are now able to peek into the ways the human mind processes information, at speeds that render social norms largely irrelevant.
Pérez concisely but thoroughly reviews the research in this area, bringing the reader up to speed in the first two chapters and connecting this literature to the dominant theories of media effects in the third chapter. In chapter 4, we are introduced to (or reminded of) the history of immigration policy in the United States, which provides an appropriate grounding for analysis of newspaper and television news coverage of immigration between 1990 and 2010. Chapter 5 is an exhaustive explanation (and defense) of the IAT, including a detailed application of its ability to capture implicit associations about Latinos. The heart of the book is chapter 6, where Pérez offers description and results for an experiment, designed to measure how powerfully implicit associations about Latinos can affect attitudes about immigration—even when the explicit context is non-Latino individuals. Analysis of the experiment is extended into the seventh chapter to show how “people with greater levels of education will more effectively connect their implicit attitude to their political judgments” (145)—a finding that Pérez notes is somewhat paradoxical. Finally, in the last chapter of original research, Pérez articulates and provides empirical support for his “social position hypothesis,” which holds that an individual's position in the racial hierarchy affects the degree to which implicit associations will affect explicit political attitudes. In an effort to encourage continued exploration, in his concluding chapter Pérez shows how his approach can be applied to contemporary events, and to our evolving understanding of racial attitudes.
Interdisciplinary examination of racial attitudes can suffer from researchers’ inability across (and even within) traditions to use consistent language, and Pérez does not attempt to remedy this dilemma. Specifically, the IAT is conceptualized as measuring implicit associations (not attitudes), and many researchers reserve the term “attitude” for conscious-level thought (saving “beliefs” for those thoughts that lie below consciousness). Using the IAT to provide support for what Pérez (and others) refer to as “implicit attitudes” may perpetuate this semantic conflation, but in this case the conceptual clarity is so vivid that it matters little. Pérez might not settle a decades-long indifference to consistency, but his contribution to the substantive question, and his demonstration of the value of experimental work in political science, results in a project that will not and should not be ignored.
Unspoken Politics is rigorous enough for a graduate-level seminar yet accessible enough for an upper-level undergraduate course. Pérez's writing is conversational, allowing an interesting and fluid encounter with even the most sophisticated of his research methods. Psychologists will appreciate the application of their approaches and theories to a political phenomenon, and political scientists will be grateful for the opportunity to learn (and to teach) how experimental design and the rapidly unfolding understanding of the human brain can help answer persistent questions of causality relating to political attitudes and behavior. I anticipate that Pérez's treatment will be an often-referenced staple in the coming decade (and beyond), as researchers continue to wrestle with the slippery swine of racial attitudes. The answers may actually reside in cooperation between many academic disciplines, and “diners” will find a useful guide here as they make their way to previously unfamiliar tables.
