A Formal Model of Co-Ethnic Voting

• In Event: Grassroots Politics

Abstract

A fundamental premise in racial politics is that minorities prefer co-ethnic candidates. This preference for in-group representation explains why Black and Latino Americans turn out at higher rates when there are co-ethnics on the ballot (Tate 1993; Barreto 2010) and why minorities cast votes for co-ethnics (Besco 2019, Goodyear-Grant and Tolley 2019). Yet, Black Americans did not fully get behind Barack Obama until he won the Iowa caucus in 2008 (Frasure 2011); during a special election to replace Hilda Solis in California's 32nd district in 2009, a third of Latinos voted for Chinese American candidate Judy Chu instead of the co-ethnic candidate Gil Cedillo (Tobar 2009); minority turnout rates do not unequivocally increase when there are co-ethnics on the ballot (Fraga 2016), and they vary by ethnicity (Fisher et al. 2015, 899; Mai-Duc 2016; Sadhawani 2020). These departures from conventional wisdom are particularly vexing in light of two attributes about the context in which they occurred: more racial minorities are running for office (Khrais 2012; Reuters 2020); they remain underrepresented in government (Bialik 2019; Brown and Atske 2019). So, why don't racial minorities always vote for one of their own? Existing answers to this question focus on either demand-side factors such as motivation and ability to vote, or supply-side factors such as candidate emergence and campaign strategy. We combine both demand and supply-side factors into a theoretical framework that emphasizes strategic interaction between candidates and voters. That is, minority candidates are strategic in their choice of mobilizing co-ethnic voters, while co-ethnic voters are strategic in how they respond to choices made by minority candidates. Results show racial minorities do not consistently support co-ethnic candidates not because ethnic empowerment and mobilization do not matter, but because as strategic voters, there are limits to how willing they are to choose descriptive representation over candidate quality.

Authors

• Fan Lu, Queen's University

• Gento Kato, Nazarbayev University