47 1 Such assumptions are called ‘heuristics’, conscious or unconscious strategies that make political decision-making easier (Lau and Redlawsk, 2001). Third, Tajfel and Turner (1979) is a key reference in the ‘shared identification’ school. They focus on the human inclination to strive for positive distinctiveness for the group they belong to, as theorized in Social Identity Theory (Tajfel, 1974; Turner and Reynolds, 2009). This predicts a general tendency towards in-group favoritism as a strategy towards gaining a positive self-group-image (Tajfel and Turner, 1979). If individuals cannot choose which group they are a part of, as is usually the case with race/ethnicity, groups engage in collective social creativity by finding ways in which to boost their group’s reputation (Haslam, 2001: 25) and “act as a group” (Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher and Wetherell, 1987). This socially creative drive for positive distinctiveness means that voters will favor candidates with whom they share the same racial/ethnic identification. Many authors also refer to a second mechanism. Voters might also prefer their in-groups because of the assumption that descriptive representation leads to substantive representation (Pitkin, 1967; Simon and Hoyt, 2008; Zipp and Plutzer, 1996). The supposed cognitive mechanism is that voters assume candidates share their policy preferences and issue priorities based on the candidate’s race/ethnicity, which can be based on either stereotyping or projection (Lerman and Sadin, 2016). As such, voters will be more inclined to favor similar candidates because voters expect them to stand up for their interests more (Cutler, 2002: 484). In the nineteen nineties, the ‘unjust stereotypes’ school was the most prominent, but has been surpassed by the ‘useful stereotypes’ school. Researchers increasingly borrow from a combination of different schools (Dahl and Nyrup, 2021; Gershon and Lavariega Monforti, 2021). The ‘shared identification’ school’s rise is more recent, with half of the studies dating from the last three years (Kao and Benstead, 2021; Lemi, 2020; Snagovsky et al., 2020). Within this most recent school, many authors combine narratives underlining the mechanisms that touch upon social identity theory and heuristics/useful stereotypes. Table 1. Overview included publications Publication Country Dataset Theory Race/ethnicity Abrajano et al., 2018 US Yes Unjust Latinx Aguilar et al., 2015 Brazil Yes Shared Black Armendariz et al., 2020 US No Unjust Black, Latinx Atkeson and Hamel, 2020 US Yes Useful Black, Latinx, Asian Badas and Stauffer, 2018 US Yes Other Black, Latinx, Asian Banerjee et al., 2014 India Yes Other OBC, SC (refcat general) Carlson, 2015 Uganda Yes Shared Both same tribe Cammett et al., 2021 Lebanon No Shared Co-ethnic Carnes and Lupu, 2016 US Yes Unjust Black Carey and Lizotte, 2019 US Yes Unjust Black, Latinx
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