at the Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center. He recieved his PhD in political science from UC Irvine in 2019.
Arora applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Parties and Prejudice: The Normalization of Antiminority Rhetoric in US Politics, and shared the following results:
Page 99 of my new book, Parties and Prejudice, drops readers right into one of its central claims: candidates who use overtly Islamophobic language tend to draw stronger support from Republican voters than from Democrats. This isn’t just about individual prejudice—it’s about how the two parties have developed very different rules, or social norms, for what counts as acceptable political speech.Visit Maneesh Arora's website.
Those norms didn’t emerge by accident. On the Republican side, several forces have worked together to shape them: conservative media outlets that amplify harmful anti-minority stereotypes and conspiracy theories, the growth of anti-minority hate groups within the far-right movement, widespread negative views of Muslims and other minority groups among Republican voters, and party incentives to appeal directly to those views.
In that sense, the Page 99 Test captures the book well. It shows how certain minority groups—notably Muslims and members of the LGBTQ+ community—face overtly hostile political rhetoric, and how the pushback against that hostility is often too weak to change the conversation. It also highlights how an inegalitarian norm environment, in which anti-minority rhetoric can be wielded unchecked, is politically useful to the GOP.
Donald Trump didn’t invent this inegalitarian political environment, but he knew how to use it. His rise shows how overt Islamophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia can take root when they’re not forcefully and categorically rejected. Parties and Prejudice explores how party politics and social norms combine to shape the political power of prejudice—and how that dynamic has reshaped the modern Republican Party and, more broadly, American politics today.
--Marshal Zeringue
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