46 1 racial/ethnic minority candidates face at the ballot box, and seeks to uncover how this is fueled by racism. The authors find that racial/ethnic minority candidates are disadvantaged (Terkildsen, 1993). Second, the ’useful stereotypes’ framework emphasizes the utility of informational shortcuts, especially when voters know little about the candidates running for office. These authors use terms such as cues, heuristics, schemata and low-information shortcuts, and posit that minority candidates experience both advantage and a disadvantage (McDermott, 1998). Third, the ’shared identification’ approach posits that racial/ethnic minority candidates are sometimes advantaged and sometimes disadvantaged, depending on who the respondents are and how they identify (Tajfel and Turner, 1979). Table 1 provides an overview of the publications and the theoretical frameworks in the selection. Key references in the three frameworks are: 1) Terkildsen (1993), 2) McDermott (1998) and 3) Tajfel and Turner (1979). All authors depart from the vantage point that candidate race/ethnicity influences how voters evaluate political candidates, yet the execution differs across publications. First, Terkildsen (1993) is a key reference in the ‘unjust stereotyping’ school. She focusses on attitudes towards hypothetical Black candidates among white respondents. She finds that the awareness of racial/ethnic cues leads to either automatic or controlled processing of prejudice. Terkildsen studies levels of self-monitoring by using skin tone to tease out whether automatic or controlled processing is taking place in the minds of respondents. The hypothesis is that dark Black skin tone triggers conscious reactions, with some people self-monitoring to provide less prejudiced answers. The bias dark Black candidates are victims of leads to a particularly ‘grim’ conclusion: ‘White voters must be held responsible for the low levels of African American elected officials in majority white districts and at the state and national levels’ (Terkildsen, 1993: 1048, 1050). In short, she concludes that white voters disadvantage Black political candidates in their voting behavior. Second, McDermott (1998) is a key reference in the ‘useful stereotypes’ school. She shifts the focus from a ‘bias against’ towards a more ‘content-based’ view of how racial/ ethnic cues serve as ‘shortcuts [in] low-information elections’ (p. 896). If respondents have more liberal beliefs, they will use belief-stereotypes to choose either a woman or a Black candidate in low-information settings. McDermott further suggests that we should relinquish the widespread focus on ‘potential bias or racism’ in favor of a focus on ‘neutral stereotyping’, influencing the voting behavior of both white and Black voters (p. 901). Voters’ use of candidate race/ethnicity and gender does not necessarily lead to the unjust under-representation of racial/ethnic minority politicians, but informs voting behavior based on voters’ political beliefs. According to this logic, using “racebelief stereotypes” (Huddy and Terkildsen, 1993; Sanbonmatsu, 2002; Schneider and Bos, 2011) could signal to voters that Black candidates more strongly favor universal healthcare and government interventions to reduce poverty (Sigelman et al., 1995).
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