Representation as Reparations? White Democrats’ Support for Black Candidates

• In Event: White Racial Liberalism in American Politics

Abstract

In majoritarian democracies, minority groups face many obstacles to achieving equitable political representation. One obstacle is that they lack the ingroup votes to elect members of their group in many contests and are likely to be disadvantaged among outgroup voters. How then can minority groups achieve representation in government? In this paper, I address this question by examining the case of white Democrats’ increasing willingness to support Black political candidates. I document this tendency by marshaling evidence from Congressional elections and conjoint experiments conducted over the past decade, during which time white Democrats’ racial attitudes have become increasingly liberal. Then, I investigate the mechanisms behind it in an original experiment. I find that the strongest predictors of support for a Black candidate in a hypothetical Congressional primary are perceiving ongoing discrimination against Black Americans and supporting the creation of a federal reparations program. Rather than being motivated by strategic partisan considerations or because they rely on race as a cognitive shortcut, many white Democratic voters support Black candidates at least in part because they view — and support — the descriptive representation of Black Americans as an issue of racial justice. The results suggest that increasing white Americans’ awareness of ongoing racial disparities may promote greater support for candidates of color.

Author

• Anna Mikkelborg, Colorado State University