Please join us for the first event of the Identities and Ideologies Project — a new community of science science faculty and students at NYU who conduct research about identity, ideology, and their intersection in both the United States and various regions of the world (also @identities_NYU).
We are launching the Junior Scholars Speaker Series with a talk by Professor Julian Wamble on Monday, September 20 from 12:30 - 1:50 PM EST. The details for Professor Wamble's talk are provided below, and also on the I&I website, along with details of other upcoming events. If you have an interest in meeting one-on-one with Professor Wamble after his talk, there are still a couple of slots available and you can sign up and find time/Zoom details for these meetings here.
Title: We Chose You: Investigating Black Voter Candidate Preference and Selection (Book Project in Progress)
Abstract: How do Black voters choose political representatives to support? Traditionally, this question has been answered by referencing the robust partisan ties Black voters have to the Democratic Party and their strong preference for Black politicians. However, with the exit of Black politicians with roots in the Civil Rights Movement, the increased variation in political strategies employed by Black politicians, and explicit racial appeals made by white politicians, the presumptions about Black voters' candidate selection have been disrupted. In this manuscript, I offer and test a new theory that relies on Black voters' social expectations for those seeking to represent them by drawing on their reverence for the long history of self sacrifice that has contributed to the group's continued sociopolitical progress. I argue that Black voters prefer candidates who are committed to prioritizing the racial group's political interests above that candidate's self-interest, and that Black voters assess the appeals made by politicians to determine their commitment. Using a large-scale experimental test of 4,200 Black Americans, I explore the information Black voters glean from candidates' appeals to show that they are more likely to evaluate politicians more positively when a candidate signals their commitment through references to past actions of personal sacrifice.