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In politics, a dog whistle is the use of Loaded language in political messaging to garner support from a particular group without provoking opposition. The concept is named after Ultrasound , which are audible to dogs but not humans. Dog whistles use language that appears normal to the majority but communicates specific things to intended audiences. They are generally used to convey messages on issues likely to provoke controversy without attracting negative attention.
subtle changes in question-wording sometimes produce remarkably different results ... researchers call this the "Dog Whistle Effect": Respondents hear something in the question that researchers do not.He speculates that campaign workers adapted the phrase from political pollsters.
In her 2006 book Voting for Jesus: Christianity and Politics in Australia, academic Amanda Lohrey writes that the goal of the dog-whistle is to appeal to the greatest possible number of electors while alienating the smallest possible number. She uses as an example politicians choosing broadly appealing words such as "family values", which have extra resonance for Christians, while avoiding overt Christian moralizing that might be a turn-off for non-Christian voters.
Australian political theorist Robert E. Goodin argues that the problem with dog-whistling is that it undermines democracy, because if voters have different understandings of what they were supporting during a campaign, the fact that they were seeming to support the same thing is "democratically meaningless" and does not give the dog-whistler a policy mandate.
One notable example was the Howard government's message on refugee arrivals. His government's tough stance on immigration was popular with voters, but was accused of using the issue to additionally send veiled messages of support to voters with racist leanings, while maintaining plausible deniability by avoiding overtly racist language. Another example was the publicity of the Australian citizenship test in 2007. It has been argued that the test may appear reasonable at face value, but is really intended to appeal to those opposing immigration from particular geographic regions.
Midway through the election campaign, the Conservative Party had hired Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby as a political adviser when they fell to third place in the polls - behind the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party. On 17 September 2015, during a televised election debate, Stephen Harper, while discussing the government's controversial decision to remove certain immigrants and refugee claimants from accessing Canada's health care system, made reference to "Old Stock Canadians" as being in support of the government's position. Marlene Jennings called his words racist and divisive, as they are used to exclude Canadians of colour.
notes the use of the concept of "strong leadership" as a dog whistle in the context of Indonesian politics.
According to United States Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the sole Palestinian-American representative in Congress, the slogan is "an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate." According to Maha Nassar, Associate Professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of Arizona, "the majority of Palestinians who use this phrase do so because they believe that, in 10 short words, it sums up their personal ties, their national rights and their vision for the land they call Palestine. And while attempts to police the slogan's use may come from a place of genuine concern, there is a risk that tarring the slogan as antisemitic – and therefore beyond the pale – taps into a longer history of attempts to silence Palestinian voices." In an interview with Al Jazeera, Nimer Sultany, a lecturer in law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, said the adjective expresses "the need for equality for all inhabitants of historic Palestine".
From a historical perspective and the perspective of Palestinian civilians, the full slogan has had several variations:
The multiplicity of political meanings behind the full chant—for some a call to freedom and others a call to ethnic cleansing— characterizes it as a dog whistle.
During the EU Referendum, the Leave campaign was accused by members of the Remain campaign such as Labour MP Yvette Cooper and Green MP Caroline Lucas of stirring up racial hatred against Eastern Europeans and ethnic minorities through anti-immigration dog whistles. Vote Leave distanced itself from Leave.EU and UKIP after the Breaking Point poster, showing predominantly Syrian and Afghan refugees near the Croatia-Slovenia border with the sole white people person in the image being obscured by text. Boris Johnson stated it was "not our campaign" and "not my politics".
During the 2024 General Election, Reform UK was accused of racist dog whistling when leader Nigel Farage stated that the then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who is of British Indians descent, "doesn't understand our culture" and "is not patriotic" after leaving commemorations for the 80th anniversary of D-Day early.
Atwater was contrasting this with then-President Ronald Reagan's campaign, which he felt "was devoid of any kind of racism, any kind of reference". However, Ian Haney López, an American law professor and author of the 2014 book Dog Whistle Politics, described Reagan as "blowing a dog whistle" when the candidate told stories about "Cadillac-driving '' and 'strapping young bucks' buying T-bone steaks with food stamps" while he was campaigning for the presidency. He argues that such rhetoric pushes middle-class white Americans to vote against their economic self-interest in order to punish "undeserving minorities" who, they believe, are receiving too much public assistance at their expense. According to López, conservative middle-class whites, convinced by powerful economic interests that minorities are the enemy, supported politicians who promised to curb illegal immigration and crack down on crime but inadvertently also voted for policies that favor the extremely rich, such as slashing taxes for top income brackets, giving corporations more regulatory control over industry and financial markets, union busting, cutting pensions for future public employees, reducing funding for public schools, and retrenching the social welfare state. He argues that these same voters cannot link rising inequality which has affected their lives to the policy agendas they support, which resulted in a massive transfer of wealth to the top 1 percent of the population since the 1980s.
In the U.S., the phrase "international bankers" is a well-known dog whistle code for Jews. Its use as such is derived from the anti-Semitic fabrication The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was frequently used by the fascist-supporting radio personality Charles Coughlin on his national show. His repeated use of the term was a factor in the distributor CBS opting not to renew his contract. The word "globalists" is similarly widely considered an anti-Semitic dog whistle.
During Barack Obama's campaign and presidency, a number of left-wing commentators described various statements about Obama as racist dog-whistles. During the 2008 Democratic primaries, writer Enid Lynette Logan criticized Hillary Clinton's campaign's reliance on code words and innuendo seemingly designed to frame Barack Obama's race as problematic, saying Obama was characterized by the Clinton campaign and its prominent supporters as anti-white due to his association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as able to attract only black votes, as anti-patriotic, a drug user, possibly a drug seller, and married to an angry, ungrateful black woman. A light-hearted 2008 article by Amy Chozick in The Wall Street Journal questioned whether Obama was too thin to be elected president, given the average weight of Americans; commentator Timothy Noah wrote that this was a racist dog-whistle, because "When white people are invited to think about Obama's physical appearance, the principal attribute they're likely to dwell on is his dark skin." In a 2010 speech, Sarah Palin criticized Obama, saying "we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern". Harvard professor (and Obama ally) Charles Ogletree called this attack racist, because the true idea being communicated was "that he's not one of us". MSNBC commentator Lawrence O'Donnell called a 2012 speech by Mitch McConnell, in which McConnell criticized Obama for playing too much golf, a racist dog-whistle because O'Donnell felt it was meant to remind listeners of black golfer Tiger Woods, who at the time was going through an infidelity scandal.
During the 2016 presidential election campaign and on a number of occasions throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was accused of using racial and antisemitic "dog whistling" techniques by politicians and major news outlets. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat remarked that the Trump campaign "slogan 'Make America Great Again' can be read as a dog-whistle to some whiter and more Anglo-Saxon past".
Former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson has been reported to use dog-whistling tactics on his former commentary show Tucker Carlson Tonight.
During the 2018 gubernatorial race in Florida, Ron DeSantis came under criticism for comments that were allegedly racist, saying: "The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state. That is not going to work. That's not going to be good for Florida." DeSantis was accused of using the verb "monkey" as a racist dog whistle; his opponent, Andrew Gillum, was an African American. DeSantis denied that his comment was meant to be racially charged.
Terms such as "woke", "CRT", and "DEI" have been described as dog whistles against Black people.
In effect, the philosopher Carlos Santana corroborates Hindess' criticism of the dog-whistle notion as being dependent on the investigator's social and moral values during his own attempted definition, writing: "We don't want every instance of bi-level meaning in political discourse to count as dog whistles, because not every instance of political doublespeak is problematic in the way prototypical dog whistles like welfare queen and family values are. Some, like backhanded compliments to political rivals, aren't a major source of social ills. Some, like aspirational hypocrisy (Quill 2010) and deliberate doublespeak meant to bring diverse constituencies together (Maloyed 2011), might even be socially beneficial. Keep in mind what makes dog whistles problematic: they harm disadvantaged groups, undermine our ability to have a functioning plural society, and muddle our ability to reliably hold political figures responsible for their actions. Given our interest in addressing these harms, it makes sense to limit our definition of dog whistles to the types of bi-level meaning which engender them."
For another instance of criticism, albeit from another direction, the psychologist Steven Pinker has remarked that the concept of dog whistling allows people to "claim that anyone says anything because you can easily hear the alleged dogwhistles that aren't in the actual literal contents of what the person says".
Mark Liberman has argued that it is common for speech and writing to convey messages that will only be picked up on by part of the audience, but that this does not usually mean that the speaker is deliberately conveying a double message.
Finally, Robert Henderson and Elin McCready argue that plausible deniability is a key characteristic of dog whistles. (2025). 9783319937939 ISBN 9783319937939
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