Who Votes for Whom?

• In Event: Political Ambition and Candidate Emergence

Abstract

Recent research finds that white Democratic voters have recently come to favor politicians of color, and men Democrats to favor women politicians. But how does the intersection of race and gender shape voters’ decision-making? A meta-analysis of recent conjoint experiments, constituting ​​16,298 pairwise choices across 11 studies, finds that Black and white, men and women Democratic voters all tend to support candidates with higher counts of marginalized identities in head-to-head matchups. This is itself an important finding given past research which finds that women of color face a “double disadvantage.” However, when choosing between candidates who each hold a single marginalized identity, white women differ from other voters, tending to support a white woman candidate over a Black man candidate, whom white men and Black men and women favor. What explains dominant-group Democrats’ support for doubly-marginalized candidates, and why do different groups of voters make different decisions when forced to choose between candidates with different marginalized identities? This project uses an original survey experiment to probe voters’ assessments of candidates as a function of their intersecting racial and gender identities, as well as their motivations for supporting these candidates. Given the increasing diversity of Democratic primary candidates, this project carries implications for the prospects for descriptive representation of both women and people of color.

Author

• Anna Mikkelborg, Colorado State University