Thread by @SBvanOosten

After Kamala Harris' nomination, I talked to a bunch of journalists about our meta-analysis on race/gender in candidate experiments.

With the exception of 1 brave journalist, everyone called me off.

I've never been called off by so many journalists. A 🧵on why I think that is.

I don't know why so many journalists called me off, but I have a hunch.

Our meta-analysis concludes that, on average, voters DO NOT discriminate against minoritized politicians.

This wasn't just one study, this is based on more than 300.000 experimental profiles of politicians assessed by respondents in more than 40 studies, mostly fielded in the US.

In fact, women and Asians have a significant advantage compared to male and white candidates. See and Open Access here: doi.org/10.1057/s41269…
hdl.handle.net/11245.1/95f085…

Yet, I see so many people lamenting that voters do not vote for women of colour so Kamala is doomed, but I'd say meta-analysis shows that it is not so simple.

This meta-analysis was done very rigorously: we went through all the available original datasets and re-analysed the data, using all the latest meta-analysis techniques.

Even though voters' first impressions are not negative towards politicians of colour or women, party selectors might assume they are and might therefore fear selecting a woman of colour for an important role.

Most importantly, political opponents can mobilize negative stereotypes of women and people of colour.

Remember how Donald Trump's entry into politics was his "Birther" campaign against Barack Obama, questioning whether he was born in the US?

The "Birther" campaign cast doubt on Obama, successfully.

JD Vance tried to mobilize negative stereotypes of women by calling Kamala Harris a "childless cat lady."

Though I believe that attempt at mobilizing negative stereotypes of women was not very successful (yet?).

And don't even get me started about the negative campaigning against Hilary Clinton in which negative stereotypes of women were mobilized.

If successful, these campaigns might be able to change voters' minds. That is what campaigns are aiming for.

But in first impression, voters are just as likely, or more likely, to vote for a woman of colour than a white man.

Though a bunch of journalists were interested initially, many didn't publish references to our research.

One journalist of a very highly esteemed newspaper even literally said to me: "people aren't interested in good news."

It doesn't fit the narrative of there being so much discrimination by voters?

This is bad news for democracy, because this assumed discrimination is what is hurting woman politicians and politicians of colour, even when voters aren't that old-fashioned anymore.

Here is the wonderful piece of the one brave journalist @sterrelindhout from @volkskrant who dared to write a hopeful article about Harris' chances.

I hope more will follow, our representative democracies need us to know this.

volkskrant.nl/buitenland/kam…