Replication Data for: Do Voters Prefer Just Any Descriptive Representative? The Case of Multiracial Candidates

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2022-06-19 23:12Z by Steven

Replication Data for: Do Voters Prefer Just Any Descriptive Representative? The Case of Multiracial Candidates

Perspectives on Politics
Volume 19, Issue 4: Special Issue: Race and Politics in America (December 2021)
pages 1061-1081
DOI: 10.1017/S1537592720001280

Danielle Casarez Lemi, Tower Center Fellow
John G. Tower Center for Political Studies, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas

While scholars of representation have examined variation in voter support conditional on shared demographic traits, we know little about how voters respond to candidates who belong to multiple racial categories. I study responses to multiracial candidates, who challenge how we think about and study representation. I theorize that multiracial categories provide mixed information about how well a candidate adheres to group norms of identity, resulting in a multiracial advantage across groups, but a disadvantage within groups. A conjoint survey experiment on 787 White, Black, Asian, and Hispanic voters and a separate analysis of support for a multiracial candidate in a real-world election support these claims. Thus, multiracial candidates have the advantage of building coalitions with voters from other groups, but they are disadvantaged when appealing to co-racials with strong racial identities. These findings demonstrate that future research on representation must engage multiracial elites.

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