67 2 Introduction – challenges to political inclusion The 2020 US-presidential election brought forward much excitement as Kamala Harris became the first woman, the first Black American, the first South Asian American, and the first biracial person to be elected Vice President of the United States (US). Some political commentators understood her appointment as a strategy to attract more women and voters of color11, in line with extensive US-literature supporting the assumption that voters favor their in-group (e.g. English, Pearson, and Strolovitch 2018). Though, is in-group voting a generalizable trend that extends beyond the idiosyncrasies of US-elections? It remains unclear whether/which voters favor ingroup politicians. In this paper, I explore the role of “descriptive representation” i.e. whether a politician and voter share the same descriptive characteristics (Pitkin, 1967), examining which voters tend to favor their in-group (based on shared religion, migration background, and gender) from both majority and minority perspectives in France, Germany and the Netherlands. Social Identity Theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1979) posits that humans tend to exhibit in-group favoritism, as commonly referenced in experimental studies about descriptive representation of minorities (e.g. Snagovsky et al. 2020; Cammett, KruszewskaEduardo, and Parreira 2021). The literatures on gender affinity voting (Dolan, 2008) and ethnic bloc voting (Bergh and Bjørklund, 2011) are sizable and established, while the literature on Muslim affinity voting is small but growing (see Azabar et al., 2020; Heath et al., 2015). These literatures formed the basis for pre-registering hypotheses stating that minorities and women prefer their in-group. The outcomes of this research were not completely as expected. I find that instead of minorities, majorities are just as, if not more, likely to favor in-group politicians, though both groups care most about shared policy. The absence of in-group favoritism among minorities aligns with a less often cited line of argumentation in Social Identity Theory, which posits that “in-group favoritism is far from universal” and depends on social status (Tajfel and Turner, 1979: 43). The influence of social status on in-group favoritism remains underexplored among researchers who cite Social Identity Theory (except Haslam, 2001: 21; Jardina, 2019b). High-status groups are more likely to favor their in-group, while low-status groups have incentives to favor the high-status outgroup in some cases as well (ibid). The independent impacts of both “descriptive,” i.e. “being like” and “substantive representation,” i.e. “standing for” (Pitkin, 1967) are challenging to investigate and compare due to their interconnected nature. In many cases, descriptive leads to substantive representation because politicians tend to support policies that resonate 11 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/14/poll-biden-black-vp-185043 Accessed November 16 2023
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