4 - An Aggregate Test of Community Commitment Signaling

Summary

This chapter relies on a large-scale experimental test with approximately 4,200 Black respondents. The experiment is designed to assess whether certain kinds of signals from politicians influence the information Black voters glean about the politician and their subsequent evaluations. This chapter looks at the aggregate effect of the signals for the purposes of seeing what if anything certain signals do regardless of who employs them. The consistent finding from this chapter is that signals of personal sacrifice are the most effective at communicating commitment to the Black community. However, questions remain about whether the race and/or gender of the politician informs these results. Taken together, Black voters' preference for costly signals is apparent here, setting the stage for the nuance discussed in the next two chapters.