Revisiting Stereotypes of Non-White Politicians’ Ideological and Partisan Orientations

• Author: Philip Edward Jones
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X13498266
• Published date: 01 March 2014
• Date: 01 March 2014
• Subject Matter: Articles

American Politics Research

2014, Vol. 42(2) 283 –310

© The Author(s) 2013

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X13498266

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Article

Revisiting Stereotypes of

Non-White Politicians’

Ideological and Partisan

Orientations

Philip Edward Jones1

Abstract

This research revisits when and how voters use race as a cue for politicians’

ideological and partisan orientations. Using an embedded survey experiment

that manipulates the race and policy positions of a (fictitious) Member of

Congress, I provide a more comprehensive view of the role of ideological

and partisan stereotypes in impression formation. Voters perceive non-

White politicians as more liberal and more likely to be Democrats than

otherwise-identical White politicians. This stereotyping persists even when

the politician takes counter-stereotypical positions (e.g., a Black or Hispanic

politician with a conservative record), and shapes non-White legislators’

approval ratings in significant ways.

Keywords

cue-taking, voter perceptions, ideological stereotypes, partisan stereotypes,

non-White politicians

Introduction

How voters form impressions of politicians and their records in office is of

central importance to our understanding of democratic accountability.

1University of Delaware, Newark, USA

Corresponding Author:

Philip Edward Jones, Department of Political Science and International Relations,

University of Delaware, 347 Smith Hall, Newark, DE 19716, USA.

Email: pejones@udel.edu

498266APR42210.1177/1532673X13498266American Politics ResearchJones

research-article2013

284 American Politics Research 42(2)

Without knowledge of what has been done in their names, constituents can-

not use electoral sanctions to punish “out of step” representatives

(Ansolabehere & Jones, 2010). Sixty years of research on the American voter

has, however, shown that few have the resources, interest, or capacity to

gather such detailed information on every politician they are asked to evalu-

ate (A. Campbell, Converse, Miller, & Stokes, 1960; Delli-Carpini & Keeter,

1996). Rather, citizens rely on a range of cues or “information shortcuts” to

make sense of a complex political world (Popkin, 1991). In particular, voters

frequently categorize newly encountered politicians as members of a general

group, and use stereotypes of that group to form impressions of the individual

(Fiske & Neuberg, 1990; Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Terkildsen, 1993).1 For

example, voters evaluating a female politician may rely on a belief that

women are more liberal than men to infer that she holds generally liberal

policy positions (Koch, 2000, 2002; M. L. McDermott, 1997).

Given the significance of race in structuring modern politics and parties

(Carmines & Stimson 1989; Green, Palmquist, & Schickler, 2002, Ch. 6), it

is unsurprising that numerous scholars have hypothesized that a stereotype of

non-Whites as liberal has a particularly strong influence on voters’ evalua-

tions of Black politicians. Empirical studies of these ideological stereotypes

have, however, reached strikingly mixed conclusions. Some conclude that

voters perceive Black politicians as more liberal than White politicians

(M. L. McDermott, 1998) while others fail to uncover any differences in vot-

ers’ perceptions of politicians of different races (Colleau et al., 1990; Weaver,

2012) or find only conditional relationships (Sigelman, Sigelman, Walkosz,

& Nitz, 1995). These conflicting findings may partly be due to differences in

research designs—some studies infer voter perceptions from responses to

candidates of different races, while others ask survey respondents to assess

general groups of politicians.

This study revisits these stereotypes and proposes a direct test of whether

voters systematically perceive non-White politicians’ records as more liberal

than their White counterparts. I develop an experiment embedded in an Internet

survey that randomly manipulates the race and policy positions of a (fictitious)

Member of Congress (MC). In several ways, the experiment provides a more

comprehensive view of how voters use the cue of a politician’s race than previ-

ous studies. I expand on previous work that focused on stereotypes of Black

politicians to also examine stereotypes of Hispanic politicians, a group that has

grown in size and prominence since early studies of cue-taking. And I extend

previous work on ideological stereotypes (of non-White politicians as liberals)

to explore partisan stereotypes (of non-White politicians as Democrats).

Early studies of cue-taking on the basis of race stressed that they applied

to “low information” environments—where voters knew little about a