Gender, Race, or Partisanship? Asian American Women in the Political Campaign

• In Event: Intersectional Approaches to Elections and Institutions

Abstract

This project aims to identify the effect of intersectionality among gendered traits messages, the race of women candidates, and partisanship on voters’ leadership evaluation. Earlier studies revealed that the intersectionality between gender and racial cues affects voters’ political preferences (Smooth 2006; Brown and Lemi 2021). At the same time, gender traits in campaign ads could also play a role in shaping voters’ perceptions of candidates (Sapiro et al., 2011; Dolan, 2014). However, the literature has focused on the intersectional effects on black women (Smooth 2006, Brown and Lemi 2021) and Latinas (Santia and Bauer 2020) while neglecting Asian American women candidates. The way that Asian American women in political leadership roles strategically navigate their racial and gender identities is a relatively underexplored phenomenon in past research. This project develops a survey experiment to investigate the effect of race and gendered traits in campaign messages, especially for women candidates. Female candidates can try to navigate their campaign strategies by using gendered traits, but the effects of such traits might vary by the candidate’s race. With a two-by-two-by-three factorial design, we provide 12 different female candidates to participants and test the voters’ preference on the intersectionality of gender traits and racial identity. Besides analyses on gendered traits and racial identity, we also conduct cross-party comparisons to investigate how Republican and Democratic voters rate their respective candidates. We argue gendered traits and racial identity matter in voters’ evaluation. We also contend Republican women candidates face significant negative evaluations than their Democrat counterparts regardless of racial identity and gendered traits.

Authors

• Dan Qi, Lamar University

• Cana Kim, Arizona State University