This... isn't true.
We have literally decades of evidence that social affinity (in terms of shared gender, race, class, etc.) shapes how voters evaluate political candidates - even when we provide explicit signals of "wavelength" (e.g. party/ideology)
A 🧵...
New paper by @MarkusWagnerAT et al shows that
- working class voters prefer a working class candidate over an upper middle class candidate
- effect goes away or reverses for middle/upper-middle class voters
➡️ shared class background matters!
See middle row of panels in Fig 6
Meta-analysis by @aecoppock & @SuSchwarz shows that:
- overall, voters tend to prefer female candidates over male candidates
- this "bonus" is twice as higher among female voters vs male voters
➡️ shared gender matters!
Paper by @BadasTweets & @k_stauffer shows that descriptive representation matters for Supreme Court judges too!
- respondents more supportive of judicial nominees of the same race/ethnicity, especially when they have opposing ideologies.
➡️ shared race/ethnicity matters!
This last paper, in particular, makes it clear that candidate characteristics like class/race/gender can matter *independently*, not just as a heuristic for guessing ideology/policy positions...
These effect sizes are not *huge*, especially when we provide information on party/ideology.
But... they exist! And are clearly relevant in contexts like the Labour leadership race, where ideology is constrained.
Lots of research on descriptive representation has been pioneered by scholars from minority backgrounds. So it is especially frustrating to see people pretend that this enormous empirical literature just... doesn't exist??
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