Brooks team to research effectiveness of race- and class-based policy communication

Scholars, advocates, legislators and other leaders have struggled with how to communicate the need for and impact of policies designed to counteract the effects of systemic racism in public policy. Funded by a research grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, Brooks faculty members Neil Lewis Jr. and Jeff Niederdeppe will engage in new research to evaluate the effectiveness of race- and class-based messaging strategies targeting racialized policy issues.

"There's a false narrative out there that says you can't talk about the role of race in public policy without alienating people or stilting the research," said Niederdeppe. "In fact, our past research has shown that with the right framing, people of diverse political and racial identities are capable of responding well to messaging that effectively communicates how a policy can undo past harm and create more equitable future outcomes."

Lewis- Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator in the Life Sciences and associate professor of public policy and communication in the Brooks School and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences- and Niederdeppe-senior associate dean of faculty and research in the Brooks School and Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of communication in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences- will team up with their colleague Kristen Brock-Petroshius, a social welfare scholar at the Stony Brook School of Social Welfare, on the upcoming research. The goals of the project are "to advance theory and evidence by examining (1) the effects of race, class, and race-and-class based messages on attitudes towards equity policies, (2) how these effects differ across policy domains, racial identity, and political ideology, and (3) possible moderators and mediators (e.g., racial group empathy, causal attribution, zero-sum thinking, and racial resentment) that explain differences in message effects."

"In the current climate there are many pressures on researchers to stop pursuing questions like ones we're asking in this project. At the same time, the need to do this work has never been more urgent," Lewis said. "If research is to have a role in creating a more just and equitable society, then we must continue studying these topics, even if doing so may make some actors uncomfortable."

Lewis and Niederdeppe have collaborated on similar projects in the past, including studies on the effects of messaging about the structural drivers of COVID disparities across race and class and messaging about the race and class implications of child tax credit expansion policies.

"We are grateful to the Russell Sage Foundation for its support of this next phase of our work and excited about the opportunity to conduct this policy communication research in the interest of creating the evidence base needed for more productive policy conversations," said Niederdeppe. "We can't create more equitable policies without doing a better job of communicating their impact to the public, and we can't do that unless we understand how the messages land with different audiences and populations."