63 1 research, avenues that the unjust and useful schools can benefit from as well. Knowing one’s respondent is central to interpreting the data derived from candidate experiments. The study of shared identification improves the understanding of the outcomes of candidate experiments. Not all group memberships are equally salient and not all individuals identify with ‘their’ group to the same extent. When scholarship includes racial/ethnic group-membership, this can improve understanding questions on the unjust nature of candidate assessments. This approach should incorporate not only top-down identities as ascribed by others, but also bottom-up processes of identification. Moreover, group membership varies across national contexts, possibly garnering completely different results. By always keeping in mind the question whether voters prefer their in-groups because of a simple preference or the expectation of substantive representation would advance the unjust and useful stereotype schools as well. The shared identification school offers a new dimension to study whether biases are unjust or useful because centralizing the respondent is imperative to interpreting these mechanisms. Is it unjust to prefer your in-group if your in-group has been historically marginalized and underrepresented in politics? Do in-groups use the same heuristics to choose candidates as out-groups do? Do voters project their own opinion onto ingroup candidates or do they stereotype in-groups all the same as out-groups might do? No matter what the political and social context is, we need to recognize that today’s candidates are tomorrow’s representatives. Awareness of how voters choose candidates is indispensable as it influences who gains political power and who does not and tells us how our representative democracy is functioning.
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