Are Minority and Women Candidates Penalized by Party Politics? Race, Gender, and Access to Party Support

• Author: Hans J. G. Hassell,Bernard L. Fraga
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912920913326
• Date: 01 September 2021
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912920913326

Political Research Quarterly

2021, Vol. 74(3) 540 –555

© 2020 University of Utah

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/1065912920913326

journals.sagepub.com/home/prq

Article

Introduction

Despite significant increases in racial and gender diver-

sity, the number of minorities and women in elected

office continues to be less than their share of the U.S.

population. Only 24 percent of the 116th Congress are

women, and 22 percent are black, Latino, Asian American,

or American Indian (Center for American Women and

Politics 2019). In comparison, the United States is 51 per-

cent female and 39 percent non-white. Simply put, mem-

bers of Congress (and most other elected bodies in the

United States) do not reflect the gender or racial/ethnic

identities of those they represent.

These long-standing disparities persist after account-

ing for age, citizenship, voter registration, or even voter

turnout, fueling a literature that initially emphasized voter

bias as a key explanation. While experimental work

repeatedly found evidence of systematic voter discrimi-

nation against minorities (Sigelman and Sigelman 1982;

Terkildsen 1993) and women (Hershey 1980; Sigelman

and Sigelman 1982), observational work relying on elec-

tion results instead suggests minimal negative effects of

race and gender on voter actions at the polls (Bejarano

2013; Dolan 2004; Highton 2004; Tate 2003), at least

after accounting for party (Dolan 2014; Tesler and Sears

2010).

More recent research has sought to explain underrep-

resentation as a product of elite-driven stages of the

electoral process where parties play a key role. Women

and African Americans consider running for office at

lower rates than white men (Fox and Lawless 2005), and

local partisan candidate recruitment networks are often

biased in favor of men and whites (Doherty, Dowling,

and Miller 2018; Niven 2006; Sanbonmatsu 2006; Shah,

Scott, and Juenke 2019). As a result, women are less

likely to challenge co-partisans in the primary (Dittmar

et al., 2017), and racial/ethnic minority candidates are

less likely to enter primaries when co-ethnic support is

insufficient to carry them to victory (Branton 2009).

913326PRQXXX10.1177/1065912920913326Political Research QuarterlyFraga and Hassell

research-article2020

1Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

2Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Bernard L. Fraga, Department of Political Science, Emory University,

327 Tarbutton Hall, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.

Email: bernardfraga@emory.edu

Are Minority and Women

Candidates Penalized by Party

Politics? Race, Gender, and Access to

Party Support

Bernard L. Fraga1 and Hans J. G. Hassell2

Abstract

Racial/ethnic minorities and women continue to be underrepresented in public office in the United States. Here, we

evaluate the role of general election political party support for women and minorities in structuring these inequalities,

as a key part of general election success is support from party networks. With detailed data on party support and the

demographics of congressional candidates, we use two difference-in-differences strategies to leverage within-district

and candidate-constant change over time. Thus, we are able to separate the effect of race/ethnicity and gender from

other factors we demonstrate to be associated with party support. We find that, all else equal, Democratic and

Republican minority nominees do not receive less support than their white counterparts. We also find that white

women receive more party support from Democrats than Democratic men or minority women in the general election

and that this support is more responsive to changes in electoral competitiveness. These findings suggest that party

elites may provide additional support to candidates from underrepresented groups in the general election to broaden

their appeal to voters.

Keywords

political parties, race and ethnicity, gender, representation, congressional elections, campaign finance

Fraga and Hassell 541

The newest research in this area examines instances

where minorities and women do enter primaries, and

finds co-partisan party elite support to be both available

(Crowder-Meyer and Cooperman 2018; Hassell and

Visalvanich 2019, but see Ocampo and Ray 2019) and

important (Hassell and Visalvanich 2019; Ocampo

2018) to the electoral success of minority and women

candidates.

We extend this previous research by examining parti-

san elite behavior at the final stage of the electoral pro-

cess. Once a candidate wins her party’s nomination,

support from the party may be expected as the candidate

is now the only person who can deliver victory for the

party in the district. As explained in greater detail below,

however, party support varies and plays a powerful role

in shaping general election outcomes (Desmarais, La

Raja, and Kowal 2015; Kolodny and Dwyre 2017), mean-

ing that a deeper understanding of gender and minority

representation demands careful attention to general elec-

tion party politics.

Our analysis examines whether parties act to hinder

(or bolster) the candidacies of minority and women party

nominees in the general election. To do so, we use data

identifying the race and gender of over 1,000 major-party

congressional candidates who won their party’s nomina-

tion between 2006 and 2014, along with three measures

of party support quantifying the resources party networks

commit to nominees in the general election. To account

for the often dissimilar environments in which minority

and women candidates seek office, we use a difference-

in-differences approach that tracks shifts in party support

when the race or gender of the party’s nominee changes

from one election to the next. We also examine the sensi-

tivity of party support to changes in electoral competi-

tiveness with a second difference-in-differences design

examining shifts in support for the same nominee before

and after redistricting. Our empirical strategy thus allows

us to determine, ceteris paribus, how party support in the

general election varies as a function of the race and gen-

der of a party’s nominee.

Overall, we find little evidence that minority or

women candidates receive less support from party elites

in general elections. Across both parties, we see no con-

sistent evidence that minority nominees or women

nominees are unable to gain co-partisan elite support.

Instead, party elites appear to boost the candidacies of

minority and women nominees relative to whites and

men under certain circumstances: most notably, the

Democratic Party donor network provides more sup-

port to women candidates, in particular white women,

compared with their male counterparts. Furthermore,

Democratic Party networks are more responsive to

changes in district competitiveness for women

candidates, providing additional party support above

and beyond the increase that normally comes when a

race is more competitive.

These findings, a product of real-world election

behavior by party elites, provide support for previous sur-

vey research suggesting the Democratic Party provides

extra support to white women versus men (Crowder-

Meyer and Cooperman 2018). Furthermore, Republican

elite support may contribute to recent successes by minor-

ity Republicans in heavily white and conservative dis-

tricts where co-partisan voter bias might be strongest

(Doherty, Dowling, and Miller 2018). In short, the evi-

dence presented here demonstrates that a lack of party

support for minorities and women at the general election

stage is not the cause of underrepresentation of minorities

and women. If anything, parties appear to be more sup-

portive of minority and women nominees than they are of

their white and male counterparts, opening up new

research questions probing the origin and substance of

this support.

Parties and Underrepresentation

While representation is ultimately dependent on who runs

for office and citizens’ decisions about who to vote for,

parties play an integral role in facilitating a candidate’s

path to elected office (Desmarais, La Raja, and Kowal

2015; Hassell 2018; Ocampo 2018). Party support may

be especially critical for racial/ethnic minority and

women candidates who may face discrimination by vot-

ers at the ballot box (Gimenez et al., 2018; Hershey 1980;

Ocampo 2018; Terkildsen 1993).

Remedying past underrepresentation may also be a

strategy pursued by parties to broaden their appeal in a

more symbolic manner. Over the past few decades, and

most recently in the Republican Party’s 2013 post-

election report, Republican leadership has repeatedly

indicated interest in strengthening their appeal to

minority voters through the promotion of minority

Republicans (Republican National Committee 2013;

Wright Rigueur 2015). Yet, some have questioned

whether or not the Republican Party has actively

engaged in these efforts (e.g., McCoy 2016). News

coverage of candidate recruitment highlights the rela-

tive strength of the Democratic Party at recruiting

women (Goldmacher 2013) but also their shortcom-

ings in supporting minorities (Herndon 2018), aligning

with recent findings that suggest parties view minority

candidates as less electable than whites (Doherty,

Dowling, and Miller 2018).

We seek to better understand how parties shape the

representation of minorities and women through their

support of minority and women candidates in the