Racial reckoning protests, the Capitol insurrection, and asymmetric social facts: A mixed-methods study of public opinion

Objectives

To test whether news images from George Floyd protests and the Capitol insurrection affected feelings about the police differentially depending on respondents’ primary news environment.

Methods

This mixed-methods explanatory study combines national digital survey experiments and structural topic modeling of open-ended questions. Survey experiments were conducted on 990 respondents in June 2020 and 1,174 respondents in January 2021, at the heights of the events.

Results

Respondents who get their news primarily from conservative sources had substantially warmer feelings about the police after seeing Floyd protest images but not after seeing Capitol insurrection images. Topic modeling and qualitative analysis suggest this group distinctively perceived Floyd protesters as “looters” and “rioters,” discussing the Floyd protests but not the insurrection in terms of racialized chaos and anxiety.

Conclusions

Findings suggest asymmetric affective dynamics driven by the racialized anxiety of consumers of mainly conservative news when seeing images of racial justice protests.