Disability, Race, and Gender in Congressional Elections

• In Event: Pushing Barriers: The Place of Disability in Politics and Political Science Mini-Conference: Disabled Political Candidates: Navigating Identity, Messaging & Voter Response

Abstract

Despite an overall increase in descriptive representation in recent years—and increasing attention in the literature to its benefits—one area that has received relatively less attention from political scientists is the descriptive representation of disabled Americans (e.g., see Bowen and Clark 2014, West 2017, and Fraga, Shah, and Juenke 2020). The purpose of this project is to examine how potential voters perceive hypothetical congressional candidates with disabilities and the additional challenges that Black (and particularly Black female) candidates with disabilities face when seeking to represent their communities.
In this paper, I use a conjoint survey experiment to test voters’ willingness to support a hypothetical congressional candidate with a disability. My hypothesis is that voters are less willing to support candidates with disabilities that are unfamiliar to them, but that they are generally more willing to support candidates who have more common disabilities about which the voter is more familiar. For example, many voters are likely to know someone who has diabetes (or they might have diabetes themselves) who wears a continuous glucose monitor and injects insulin to treat their condition. At the same time, voters are relatively less likely to know someone with a hearing disability who uses an American Sign Language Interpreter. Drawing on the contact hypothesis in psychology (e.g., see Allport 1954), I argue that familiarity with someone with a minoritized identity is likely to build greater understanding and acceptance of that person and their identity. Illustrating the power that knowing someone with a minoritized identity can have on reducing prejudice, a 2009 Gallup poll showed a 23-percentage point gap in support for gay marriage between those who knew someone who was openly gay and those who did not.[1] Since a potential voter is more likely to know someone who has diabetes (about 10% of the population) than someone who uses an ASL translator (less than 1% of the population), I expect they will be more willing to support the candidate who wears a continuous glucose monitor for diabetes than the one who uses an ASL translator.[2]
Second, I hypothesize that voters will be less willing to support disabled candidates for office who also hold other minoritized identities. The Wikipedia page for “American politicians with disabilities” shows fewer that than 10 percent of those listed are female and fewer than 2 percent are Black.[3] This list is not complete—for example, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), who has alopecia, is not listed—but the general patterns demonstrate a clear disparity in representation. I expect that conservatives and some moderates will favor more “traditional” candidates, that is those who are cisgendered white men who do not have a disability. These voters, particularly conservatives but also some moderates—are more likely to have a “fixed” worldview (see Hetherington and Weiler 2018) and oppose the social change that an increase in the number of disabled officeholders with other minoritized identities would entail. At the same time, I expect that while liberals who support social progress are more willing to support these candidates, they may have concerns about electability, which may prevent these candidates from winning their party’s nomination. After analyzing the results of my survey experiment, this research will provide a baseline for voters’ attitudes about candidates with disabilities that can be used in future studies, as well as by groups seeking to recruit a more diverse slate of candidates for Congress.

Author

• Jacob Forrest Harrison Smith, Fordham University