Thinking Beyond Boxes: Blurring the Bounds of Group Membership

• In Event: Get a Grip or Group

Abstract

We use an intersectional framework to explore how associations with a marginalized
community and sexism, heterosexism, and racism shape evaluations of candidates run-
ning for office, particularly for candidates that are not themselves members of a given
marginalized group. We extend the concept of racialization to a more general concept
of associational affect by exploring the role of (hetero)sexism and racial resentment,
applying the racialization process to individuals, and testing whether interest groups
can also have a racializing effect. To test our hypothesis, we first leverage the close ties
between Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Clinton with President Obama
to demonstrate that Clinton is penalized more by racially resentment individuals than
Biden when each is associated with President Obama, suggesting that the racialization
process is more complicated and can be affected by factors such as gender. We also
fielded a second experiment manipulating the social identities of candidates running
for office and whether those candidates are endorsed by groups advocating on behalf of
historically marginalized groups such as women, people of color, and LGBT folks. We
find evidence that these endorsements matter as much, if not more, in shaping people’s
support for candidates running for office than the candidate’s gender, race, and sexu-
ality. We argue that respondents use these endorsements as a proxy for which groups
that a candidate will likely support while in office and whether they will support or
challenge the existing social hierarchy. We find evidence that effect of endorsements on
candidate evaluations is stronger for some candidates than others, with comparatively
privileged groups such as white men not being penalized as much as those that are (in-
tersectionally) marginalized on the dimensions of race, gender, and/or sexuality. We
similarly find evidence that the opposite result plays out under certain circumstances:
respondents with low levels of sexism, heterosexism, and racial resentment are more
likely to positively evaluate candidates with group endorsements than those without
them. Together, these results suggest that the effects of a candidate’s ascribed identity
and in- and out-group evaluations are intimately tied to perceived group loyalties and
are more complex and than ascribed identity alone.

Authors

• Gabriel Borelli, Princeton University

• Ryan Bell, Princeton University