The Pigmentocracy of Executive Approval

• Published date: 01 February 2025
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140241237464
• Author: Shane P. Singh,Ryan E. Carlin
• Date: 01 February 2025

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2025, Vol. 58(2) 327–363

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140241237464

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The Pigmentocracy of

Executive Approval

Shane P. Singh

1

and

Ryan E. Carlin

2



Abstract

We advance a theory of pigmentocratic executive approval that accounts for

both skin color-based group attachments and deviations in skin tone between

citizens and leaders. We argue that such deviations will decrease approval

most strongly for those lighter in complexion than the incumbent. We further

argue that individuals will most strongly punish incumbents for poor eco-

nomic performance when their skin tone is lighter than the executive’s. To

test our theory, we assess the skin tone of dozens of leaders from the

Americas, and we couple the resulting measure with mass survey data from

the leaders’countries. Our findings demonstrate that executive approval

throughout the Americas replicates patterns of “pigmentocracy”—inequal-

ities and hierarchies that privilege lighter skin tones.

Keywords

elections, public opinion, and voting behavior, presidents and executive

politics, race, ethnicity and politics

1

University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

2

Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Shane P. Singh, Department of International Affairs, University of Georgia, 305 Candler Hall,

Athens, GA 30602, USA.

Email: singh@uga.edu

Data Availability Statement included at the end of the article

Introduction

Popular leaders are powerful leaders. They more easily advance their agendas

(e.g., Calvo, 2007;Canes-Wrone & de Marchi, 2002), prevail in inter-branch

bargaining (Mart´

ınez-Gallardo, 2012), scrap term limits (Corrales, 2018), and

avoid career-ending scandals (P´

erez-Liñ´

an, 2007). Popular prime ministers

deter no-confidence votes and coalition defections almost by definition. If

executives’public standing is so politically consequential, then understanding

how citizens judge them is theoretically imperative. But such judgments

reveal as much about the limits of human cognition as the leader in question.

Rather than gathering and processing information via complex algorithms,

individuals often rely on social categorization (Tajfel et al., 1971) and

cognitive heuristics (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) triggered by social, po-

litical, and physical cues.

This study investigates how individuals use skin tone to form assessments

of executive performance. Physical appearance is rich in the sorts of cues

individuals seek (e.g., Lau & Redlawsk, 2001;Lawson et al., 2010). For

example, when evaluating Barack Obama, Americans cued on skin tone

(Caruso et al., 2009;Gates, 2009) in addition to race (Abrajano & Burnett,

2012;Lewis-Beck et al., 2010). Obama’s skin tone made him an outlier among

U.S. presidents but not among contemporary leaders in newer democracies,

where other common heuristics, such as partisanship (Lupu, 2016) may

provide relatively weak cues. How do individuals employ skin tone to judge

political executives? Answering this question is crucial for understanding

leaders’popularity and, in turn, power.

Our theoretical framework combines the heuristic reasoning associated

with group identity and colorism to inform a “pigmentocracy”model.

Lipschutz (1944) coined the term “pigmentocracy”to describe Latin

America’s“hierarchies based on both ethnoracial categories, such as Indig-

enous and black, and a skin color continuum”(Telles, 2014, pp. 3–4; emphasis

added). Adopting this logic, we expect citizens both to categorize leaders into

ingroups and outgroups by skin tone and to reward leaders lighter than

themselves. We test our theory with an original dataset that pairs skin tone

measures of 45 political executives and over 105,000 citizens across

23 countries from 84 AmericasBarometer surveys conducted in Latin America

and the Caribbean.

1

Results provide little support for group-identity models—which predict

greater approval (or disapproval) of leaders with skin tones like their own—or

a colorism model—which predicts greater approval of leaders with lighter

skin tones regardless of one’s own. Instead, results support a model that

incorporates elements of both into a pigmentocratic hierarchy. Wevalidate our

model in two ways. First, we leverage its observable implications for eco-

nomic accountability. Second, we conduct an out-of-sample test using the

328 Comparative Political Studies 58(2)

American National Election Study. The analyses bolster internal and external

validity, respectively.

This study makes several contributions. Theoretically, our pigmentocracy

model helps bridge competing and sometimes contradictory accounts of how

ethnoracial identity and skin tone influence political behavior in Latin

America and the United States. Normatively, our finding that executive ap-

proval in the Americas replicates patterns of pigmentocracy further under-

mines theses of “racial democracy,”“mestizaje,”and “Iberian

exceptionalism”(see recent reviews in Clealand, 2017;Morgan & Kelly,

2022). Practically, pigmentocracy in economic sanctioning suggests a double

standard—lighter-skinned citizens hold darker-skinned executives to greater

account. If public prestige equates roughly to executive power (Neustadt,

1960), then, to some extent, skin tone anchors leaders’political authority.

Ethnoracial Identity, Skin Tone, and Political Behavior

in Context

Ethnoracial identity and colorism represent two explanations of how race,

ethnicity, and skin color shape political behavior. Both are grounded in

psychological theories of heuristic reasoning, wherein people employ

available cues and stereotypes to make low-information decisions. Identity

models predominate in the United States, while in Latin America and the

Caribbean colorism models are more central. Skin tone is not a universal

source of social identity in either context, but it is a source of social dis-

crimination in both. These conclusions inform our hybrid model of public

opinion formation, in which skin tone heuristics fuel ingroup and outgroup

categorization and combine with colorism to shape evaluations of political

executives.

Mere Categorization, Minimal Groups, and Social Identity

The Minimal Group Paradigm established that “mere categorization”on

arbitrary criteria (e.g., preferences for artwork by Klee or Kandinsky) could

induce intergroup discrimination even absent conflict (Tajfel, 1970;Tajfel

et al., 1971). Aside from arbitrary and anonymous categorization, the para-

digm features the requirement that intergroup evaluations or allocations

cannot serve utilitarian self-interests. Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner,

1986) reverses this requirement, positing group membership and intergroup

differentiation on valued dimensions as sources of meaning and a positive

self-concept. Categorization, thus, leads to ingroup favoritism and outgroup

derogation to the extent that social competition fuels evaluative social

comparisons and claims to group superiority.

Singh and Carlin329