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Kevins_Race class or both Responses to candidate characteristics in Canada the UK and the US.pdf (2.23 MB)

Race, class, or both? Responses to candidate characteristics in Canada, the UK, and the US

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-10-16, 12:29 authored by Anthony KevinsAnthony Kevins
Research suggests that voters use identity markers to infer information about candidates for office. Yet politicians have various markers that often point in conflicting directions, and it is unclear how citizens respond to competing signals – especially outside of a few highly stigmatized groups in the US. Given the relevance of these issues for electoral behavior and patterns of representation, this article examines the impact of intersectional identities and less intensely stigmatized markers in Canada, the UK, and the US. It does so using a survey experiment that varies the race (white/East Asian) and class background (higher/lower) of a candidate for office. I then compare results across the cases, examining willingness to vote for the candidate as well as assumptions about his ideological proximity, relatability, and potential contributions. In doing so, I build from past research suggesting that voter ideology likely shapes reactions to candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds. Results suggest that marginalized identity markers have relatively widespread effects among leftists and (to a lesser extent) centrists, but that, outside of the Canadian left, class seems to matter more than race. Overlapping marginalized identities, in turn, had little impact, with the lower-class white and East-Asian profiles eliciting similar reactions.

History

Published in

Politics, Groups, and Identities

Volume

9

Issue

4

Pages

699-720

Publisher

Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Author

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

Acceptance date

2019-06-23

Publication date

2019-07-03

Copyright date

2019

ISSN

2156-5503

eISSN

2156-5511

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Anthony Kevins. Deposit date: 14 October 2019

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