Reevaluating Social Identity Theory: Minority Women and Participation

• In Event: Political Ambition and Candidate Emergence

Abstract

There is often an assumption among scholars that higher levels of group identification and politicization always leads to higher levels of political participation, and that this can generally be applied to all forms of participation. However, I suspect this may not always be the case. In order to explore this relationship, my research seeks to answer the following question: Do higher levels of group consciousness among women always lead to higher levels of political participation? I suspect that for women of color and queer women, the relationship between high group consciousness and participation is less straightforward. Social science and theory often lack attention to the experiences of women through the absence of concepts that tap women’s diverse, non-monolithic experiences. The development of the consciousness-to-participation pipeline reflects being male in a patriarchal society, which in itself conditions a degree of freedom that women do not have. White men, who have held the most power to implement consciousness, have therefore created concepts in the social sciences to reflect that power, including a failure to explore alternative forms of political participation among minority groups. My research seeks to remedy this and develop a new concept for understanding women’s political identities by looking at the discontinuities between their consciousness and participation across racial and queer identities. This project is my dissertation, and Chapter 1 uses ANES data to show that queer women and women of color have generally higher levels of gender consciousness than heterosexual white women. For APSA's Conference, I am requesting to present my theory and experimental design for Chapter 2, which examines the translation of gender consciousness to various avenues of participation among different groups of women. The goal of chapter two is to explore the effects of gender consciousness on propensity to participate across the mediums of voting, campaigning, donating, protesting, and volunteering; and notably, to see if there are differences across different groups of women in the methods they choose or even success of the primes. It tackles one core question: does priming gender consciousness create differential effects- both in height of consciousness but also participation- in regards race, ethnicity, and sexuality among women? I expect that, for participation, priming gender consciousness is more effective for white, straight women in enhancing what I refer to as institutional forms of participation such as campaigning, and donating than other groups of women. I also anticipate that priming gender consciousness will be more effective in enhancing the propensity to protest and volunteer among women of color and queer women. These expectations stem from a deep dive that my dissertation takes into the world of feminist theory, and particularly from Black feminist theory. Finally, I introduce a race-gendered and queer woman prime for women of color and queer women respectively, which looks at how women respond if the prime in question also encompasses their racial or sexual identities.

Author

• Morrey Liedke, University of California, Riverside