Voter Responses to Black Women Candidates

Sister Style ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 135-163
Author(s):  
Nadia E. Brown ◽  
Danielle Casarez Lemi
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Real World ◽  
Skin Tone ◽  
Women Candidates ◽  
Black Candidates ◽  
Mayoral Election ◽  
Survey Experiments ◽  
Black Voters

This chapter presents findings from two survey experiments on Black voters. As many Black candidates run in majority-minority districts, the chapter’s focus on Black voters approximates realistic scenarios. Experiment 1 focuses on Black voters’ evaluations of a single candidate as her skin tone and hairstyle are varied, and Experiment 2 focuses on Black Democratic voters’ evaluations of two Black women candidates to determine whether appearances have the potential to split Black Democrats’ votes. Experiment 2 approximates real-world scenarios like the 2019 mayoral election in Chicago between Lori Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle. This chapter speaks to how Black voters evaluate Black women candidates who vary in phenotype.

Sister Style

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadia E. Brown ◽  
Danielle Casarez Lemi
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Politicians ◽  
Skin Tone ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Deep Dive ◽  
Women Candidates ◽  
Phenotypic Profile ◽  
Gendered Identities ◽  
Candidate Evaluations ◽  
Hair Texture

Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites centers Black women’s bodies, specifically their hair texture and skin tone, to argue that phenotypic differences among Black women politicians directly impact how they experience political office and how Black voters evaluate them. The book brings together an interdisciplinary, multi-method, and blended epistemological approach of positivism and interpretivism to ask whether African American women’s appearances provide a more nuanced lens through which to study how their raced-gendered identities impact their candidacies and shape their political behavior. The authors take a deep dive into intersectional theory-building, through which they examine the intra-categorical differences among Black women. They find that Black women vary in their political experiences because of their appearances, and that dominant, Eurocentric beauty standards influence the electoral chances of Black women. They observe that skin tone and hair texture, along with the historical legacies that have shaped the current cultural and political contexts, dictate Black women elites’ political experiences and voter evaluations of them. The book asks the following questions: What do the politics of appearance for Black women mean for Black women politicians and for Black voters who evaluate them? What are the origins of the contemporary focus on Black women’s bodies in public life? How do Black women politicians themselves make sense of the politics of appearance? Is there a phenotypic profile into which most Black women politicians fit? What is the effect of variation in Black women’s phenotypes for candidate evaluations? And how do voters process the appearances of Black women candidates?

Linked Fate, Black Voters, and Black Women Candidates

Sister Style ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 164-171
Author(s):  
Nadia E. Brown ◽  
Danielle Casarez Lemi
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Data ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Relevant Literature ◽  
Black Politics ◽  
Vote Choice ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Women Candidates ◽  
Linked Fate ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Black Voters

This chapter examines how linked fate—a feeling of closeness to group members—may shape how Black voters respond to Black women candidates. It provides a brief review of the relevant literature on linked fate and colorism, a novel inclusion to this foundational concept in Black politics. The chapter includes colorism in an analysis of linked fate and its significance to vote choice, and it more fully fleshes out these implications for the appeal of Black women candidates to men and women voters who report a sense of linked fate. Using experimental data, the authors do not find strong evidence of heterogeneity by linked fate. The chapter ends with a discussion of how Black women candidates’ bodies influence vote choice.

Melanin and Curls: Evaluation of Black Women Candidates

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Casarez Lemi ◽  
Nadia E. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Male ◽  
White Women ◽  
Skin Tone ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Women Candidates ◽  
Discrimination Hypothesis ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Hair Texture ◽  
Positive Effect

AbstractResearch on candidate evaluation has delved into questions of how voters evaluate women candidates, Black male candidates, as well as how candidates’ appearances may condition electoral opportunities. Combined, this scholarship has tended to focus on how race, gender, and skin tone privilege or undermine evaluations of Black male or White women candidates. We intervene to study Black women candidates and draw on research on colorism and Black women's hairstyles and ask: How does variation in skin tone and hairstyle affect Black voter evaluations of Black women candidates? We develop and test two hypotheses: the empowerment hypothesis and the internal discrimination hypothesis. We mostly find support for the latter. Importantly, we find that the interaction of dark skin and non-straight hair has mostly negative effects on Black men and women's trait evaluations, but a positive effect on Black women's willingness to vote for the candidate. Furthermore, this research shows that hair texture is an important aspect of responses to Black women candidates—hair is not just hair for Black women candidates. This research shows that understanding the effects of candidate appearance on voter behavior necessitates considering the intersection of racial and gender phenotypes.

scholarly journals Attitudes to Moonlighting Politicians: Evidence from the United Kingdom

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosie Campbell ◽  
Philip Cowley
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Real World ◽  
Conflict Of Interest ◽  
Medical Doctors ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Survey Experiments ◽  
Part Time ◽  
Survey Instruments ◽  
The Impact

AbstractResearch has explored the impact of politicians holding second jobs, or moonlighting, on their performance and recruitment, but less is known about how citizens respond to such behavior. Citizens may react negatively to Members of Parliament (MPs) moonlighting, viewing outside earnings as a conflict of interest or a distraction, or instead they might view MPs with second incomes positively, seeing them as a connection with the “real world” beyond politics. Utilizing a series of survey experiments, we assess how British citizens respond to MPs moonlighting. We demonstrate preferences more complex than those revealed by traditional survey instruments. Citizens respond to both size and source of income. They do not respond negatively to all second incomes; they are more sympathetic to the entrepreneur who continues to draw an income than medical doctors or lawyers who continue to practice. They are most hostile to politicians who take on part-time company directorships.

scholarly journals Shadism from the Perspective of Intersectionality in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 222-227
Author(s):  
Ahmed Seif Eddine Nefnouf
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Skin Tone ◽  
Racial Group ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Intersectionality Theory ◽  
Bluest Eye ◽  
Women And Girls ◽  
New Vision

This paper aims to discuss shadism from a perspective of intersectionality and how people with a darker skin tone suffered particular forms of discrimination due to the issues of shadism and its interaction with the class, gender, age, ability, and race.  Shadism has infused the black society for many centuries, hence outlined during slavery. Shadism is the discrimination against a person with a darker skin tone, typically among individuals of the same racial group. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison describes how African American women and girls like Pecola are considered ugly by her family and the community due to her darker skin tone. in this research paper we are going to explore shadism and examine intersectionality theory like race, gender, sexuality and class, and their influence on dark-skinned black women, through the main character Pecola Breedlove. Using intersectionality theory to understand shadism helps to know that there are different ways a person could face oppression and domination. This paper gives a new vision of shadism which have been studied as amatter of racism, but throughout the intersectionality of the the identity component. The analysis shows that shadism is influenced by race and other aspects of intersectionality such as gender, race, age and ability, and other aspects of identity.

Virtual Humans Elicit Skin-Tone Bias Consistent with Real-World Skin-Tone Biases

2008 ◽  
pp. 237-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brent Rossen ◽  
Kyle Johnsen ◽  
Adeline Deladisma ◽  
Scott Lind ◽  
Benjamin Lok
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Skin Tone ◽  
Virtual Humans ◽  
Skin Tone Bias

Backing up, not backing down: Mitigating audience costs through policy substitution

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Lin-Greenberg
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Crisis Bargaining ◽  
Audience Costs ◽  
Survey Experiments ◽  
The Future ◽  
Original Survey

Can a leader reduce the audience costs imposed for backing down completely on a threat by opting instead to ‘back up’ to a less hawkish policy? Current research examines the political repercussions of making a threat and then taking no action at all. Real world leaders, however, often ‘back up’ and implement policies that involve some action – for instance, imposing sanctions after threatening military force, rather than backing down entirely. This article argues that audience costs can be mitigated through policy substitution: backing up to less hawkish policies – that reduce inconsistency between a leader’s words and deeds – may reduce audience costs. A series of original survey experiments finds support for the argument and demonstrates that the population treats inconsistency as a continuum. The findings have implications for domestic politics and crisis bargaining. Domestically, a leader who backs up faces lower audience costs and is seen as more competent than one who backs down. Yet those on the receiving end of threats are less likely to believe the future threats of a foreign leader who has previously backed up or backed down. Backing up therefore degrades the credibility of crisis signals by making it difficult for rivals to distinguish between credible threats and those that will be backed up.

Stereotyping or Projection? How White and Black Voters Estimate Black Candidates' Ideology

2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy E. Lerman ◽  
Meredith L. Sadin
Keyword(s):  
Black Candidates ◽  
Black Voters
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