26 permeable, they will strive for individual mobility to join the high-status group, leading to out-group favoritism. If group relations are seen as legitimate and stable, individuals will try to achieve positive distinctiveness through social creativity by redefining what it means to be part of their group, an indirect form of in-group favoritism. If group boundaries are perceived as impermeable and status differences as illegitimate and/or unstable, low-status groups are more likely to choose social competition, leading to direct and open in-group favoritism. For high-status groups, the same three strategies exist, but they always lead to in-group favoritism. If group boundaries are perceived as permeable, high-status groups expect low-status groups to exert individual mobility and join the high-status group. If not, high-status groups may argue that low-status groups are guilty of causing their own inferiority. If group boundaries are perceived as impermeable, legitimate, and stable, high-status group members may exhibit highminded benevolence while engaging in latent discrimination and covert repression. If a high-status group perceives group relations as unstable and threatening, they may resort to supremacist ideologizing, conflict, open hostility, and antagonism by directly promoting the out-group’s inferiority. In summary, low-status groups may prefer their in-group or out-group under certain conditions, while high-status groups tend to prefer their in-group under all conditions, leading to universal in-group favoritism (for an overview, see Haslam, 2001: 21–26). Another explanation for in-group voter preferences might lie in Heuristics Theory, which ascribes more logical reasoning to the process shaping voting preferences. This theory states that voting citizens use heuristics - shortcuts or cues, often based on politician identity - to infer policy positions of politicians, particularly from their in-group, by simplifying voting citizens’ decision-making process (Cutler, 2002) and offering solutions when voting citizens are faced with overly difficult decisions (Koch, 2000). McDermott (1998) studied this phenomenon using candidate experiments. She moved away from stereotypes being a ‘bias against’ race or gender and moved the field towards understanding heuristics as a more ‘content-based’ view of how race and gender cues serve as ‘shortcuts [in] low-information elections’ (McDermott, 1998: 896). Indeed, she says one should depart from the common practice of focusing on ‘potential bias or racism’ towards ‘neutral stereotyping’ influencing the voting behavior of both white and black voters (1998: 901). Voting citizens use candidate race and gender to inform voting behavior based on voting citizens’ political beliefs. Indeed, some people use gender as a heuristic when making difficult voting decisions (Holman et al., 2016; Koch, 2016; Lau and Redlawsk, 2001). By intertwining representation theory, social identity theory, and heuristics theory, this dissertation puts forward a holistic understanding of voter behavior of minority voters and perceptions of minority politicians. The combination of these theoretical perspectives reaches beyond traditional scholarly disciplines by investigating the relationship between representation, identity, and heuristics.
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