Assessing Racial Identity as Constraint on Democratic Accountability

• In Event: Descriptive Representation, Substantive Representation, or NO Representation?

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that voters’ use of racial identity as information for formulating electoral judgments is much more pragmatic than previous researchers have made it out to be. Using an abstracted experimental design which allows us to assess the racial group identity-based representation preferences of Black and White Americans, we elucidate the logic of support for co-racial representatives by clarifying how race functions as: 1) information about the potential for prospective representation of individual interest and 2) information that could potentially bias the uptake of new information about how well interest is actually being represented. We find that Black, but not White, study participants express strong preferences for having racial ingroup members make decisions that affect their interest, and that this ingroup preference, by no means, renders Black participants immune to updating as critics of identity politics might claim. If anything, it is Black participants’ particular sensitivity to White representatives’ (out-group) inability to faithfully represent their interests that biases their judgments. Thus, the evidence presented from these experiments suggests that race as information in elections likely functions, initially, as a low information cue that racial minority voters use to infer the potential for substantive representation, but once performance information is made clear, minority voters readily engage in retrospective evaluations of politicians which includes abandoning co-racial representatives who fail to faithfully represent their interest.

Authors

• Burcu Kolcak, Rutgers University

• Corrine M. McConnaughy, Princeton University

• Melanye Tarea Price, Prairie View A&M University

• Tina Tucker, Duke University

• Ismail K. White, Princeton University