Political Ambition among Racial Minorities: Randomized Field Experiments

• In Event: Experiments on Social Media, the Internet, and Political Engagement

Abstract

While the identity of politicians is an important topic in understanding minority under-representation in U.S. politics, empirical research rarely examines candidate emergence process among racial minorities. This research examines how racial identity affects the very first stage of candidate emergence process among racial minorities: nascent political ambition. I identify various mechanisms by which identity can be activated to promote interest in candidacy and test their effects in a real-world candidate recruitment effort on 13,000 members of a campaign training organization that trains racial minorities to run for office. Through an adaptive-response trial, I test a large number of recruitment messages that prime a particular identity-driven mechanism at a time, and use a static design to estimate the causal effects on engagement on a set of high-performing messages identified through the adaptive trial. Through a hybrid experimental design, this research is able to use the sample more efficiently while drawing inference with high statistical power. This research adds a novel perspective to the literature on candidate emergence by emphasizing the role racial identity plays in the political selection process.

Author

• Diana Da In Lee, Princeton University