Race and Judgment in Choice of Representatives

• In Event: Enhancing Pluralism by Understanding Systemic Biases

Abstract

For American democracy, race has been an ever-ready tool of elite influence over mass decisions, making central questions the extent to which the elite-created "information" of race in politics can constrain processes of citizens' decisionmaking such that it obscures information uptake about who is and is not best representing their interests. In observational contexts, difficulties for empirically assessing this question abound. We thus turn to an abstracted, experimental approach, embedding participants in a rigged decisionmaking game-a game where we provide "interests" via small monetary payouts, "elections" that are full-individual-control exercises of choice over by whom to be "governed," and "judges" that (seem to) exert full control over the outputs from the governors to the governed. Across a set of studies we vary 1) the racial makeup of the two-judge set from which participants can choose; 2) whether or not participants can choose their first-round judge; and 3) the race of their opponent. We uncover several empirical patterns of "benefit of the doubt" for black judges (governors) and a racial divergence in willingness to update this belief in the face of information that it did not serve one's interests. We also find some evidence of hyper-vigilance of Black participants under the "rule" of white judges. These patterns suggest potential mechanisms of race as constraint based on (mis)trust, stereotypes of (un)fairness, and potentially expressive choosing to be governed by the minority-race-identified judge until sufficient certainty about the losses experienced under them is established.

Authors

• Corrine M. McConnaughy, Princeton University

• Tina Tucker, Duke University

• Ismail K. White, Princeton University