56 1 Do unjust or useful stereotypes matter nonetheless? One could also argue that these null-effects are misleading, presenting an overly positive picture. We discuss three possible arguments for this: 1) intersectionality, 2) intensity of responses and 3) social desirability bias. First, a reason why one could argue that the null-effects should not be interpreted too optimistically, could lie in the intersectional nature of political candidates who, besides an race/ethnicity also have a gender and many other attributes. Intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) is an increasingly popular approach to understanding the position of minority women in politics (Ward, 2016, 2017). An intersectional analysis is distinct from a unitary or multiple one (Hancock, 2007). Where a unitary analysis foregrounds one background characteristic (e.g., race or gender) and a multiple analysis adds up the effects of multiple ones (e.g., race and gender), an intersectional analysis highlights the interaction between them (e.g., race interacts with gender) (idem). In order to quantitatively study the intersectional position of minority women in politics, many scholars call the use of interaction effects and candidate experiments viable yet “underutilized” methodological solutions (Klar and Schmitt, 2021: 493, 495). However, Schwarz and Coppock (2022) have conducted a meta-analysis of all candidate experiments in which researchers both randomize race/ethnicity and gender and conclude that voters assess white women candidates more positively than Black women candidates, although the difference between the two is not statistically significant. They conclude that evidence for intersectional effects is “modest” (Schwarz and Coppock, 2022: 9). Although Schwarz and Coppock (2022) point towards modest support for a “double disadvantage” for Black woman candidates, some researchers also points to a “strategic advantage” for women of color (Gershon and Lavariega Monforti, 2021), often dependent on the political context (Hughes, 2013, 2016; Kao and Benstead, 2021). Double disadvantage posits that the disadvantages political candidates face are more than a sum of their subordinate group memberships. Strategic advantage means that multiple disadvantaged background characteristics could amount to less disadvantage than a sum of its parts. In other words, belonging to more than one disadvantaged group cancels out part of the negative effect of the disadvantaged categories. One could argue that the average null-effects might obscure intersectional effects, where one subgroup of Black candidates does face bias, while another does not. This is an important avenue for future research, especially since these dynamics could obscure the outcomes of this meta-analysis, as many studies randomize both gender and race/ ethnicity at the same time. Second, researchers are becoming aware of how the intensity with which voters respond to candidate race/ethnicity drives results in conjoint experiments (Abramson et al., 2022). It is, therefore, important to understand results as averages, without being able to infer preferences of the majority of the population or indeed every part of the
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