72 2 to the out-group’s superiority. If group boundaries are perceived as impermeable and status differences as illegitimate and/or unstable, low-status groups are more likely to choose social competition, leading to direct and open in-group favoritism (Haslam, 2001: 25), also known as “fighting fire with fire” in the case of Muslim voters voting for a political party advocating for and run by Muslims in the Netherlands, DENK (Loukili, 2021a, 2021b). In summary, not all low-status groups favor their in-group. For high-status groups, the same three strategies exist, but they always lead to ingroup favoritism. If group boundaries are perceived as permeable, high-status groups expect low-status groups to exert individual mobility and join them. If not, high-status groups may argue that low-status groups are guilty of causing their own inferiority. If group boundaries are perceived as impermeable, legitimate, and stable, high-status group members may exhibit “magnanimity” while engaging in latent discrimination and covert repression (Haslam, 2001: 26), which may be the case amongst high-status groups claiming to be color-blind (Tiberj and Michon, 2013). If a high-status group perceives group relations as unstable and threatening, they may resort to supremacist ideologizing, conflict, open hostility, and antagonism by directly promoting the outgroup’s inferiority (Haslam, 2001: 26), as is the case with some members of populist radical right parties (Kešić and Duyvendak, 2019; Kortmann et al., 2019). Thus, for low-status groups, the choice of strategy depends on various factors and may lead to different outcomes. For high-status groups, all strategies lead to in-group favoritism. With regard to political representation, low-status groups might exhibit social creativity to redefine what representation means to them by leaning less on valuing descriptive representation, but by caring about substantive representation more, so as to not challenge the outgroup’s superiority. Meanwhile, high-status groups might also exhibit social creativity by exhibiting how big-hearted they are by showing that policy matters more to them and that they are not racist, but colorblind and moreover, value policy over identity in political representation. Indeed, although there is not much research comparing the descriptive and substantive representation directly, the few existing studies find that policy matters more than identity (Goodyear-Grant and Croskill, 2011; Holman et al., 2016; Schneider and Bos, 2016), such as when researchers add partisanship to the experimental design and find that it “crowds out” identity (Kirkland and Coppock, 2018), even in within-party leadership races, arguably a least likely case (Baron et al., 2023; Wauters et al., 2022) . A major caveat of the above studies is that they do not oversample minority groups and therefore mostly study the white majority. Nonetheless, I pre-registered the following hypothesis: H2. Respondents prefer politicians with similar policy positions to politicians with similar descriptive characteristics.
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