6 - Community Commitment Signaling and White Candidate Evaluations

Summary

This chapter investigates whether the community commitment signaling framework is only applicable to Black politicians. Much of the work that explores Black political representation focuses on the relationship that Black people have with Black politicians despite the fact that they, on average, vote for more White politicians than Black ones, especially at higher levels of office. Using the same experimental design from the two previous chapters, I look into whether Black voters' expectations for commitment only exist for politicians who look like them. I find that while the baseline preference for politicians does favor Black ones, White politicians, particularly White men politicians, who engage costly sacrificial behavior still gain Black support. White woman politicians, however, see little to no improvement in perceptions of them regardless of the signal they use. This effect is driven primarily by Black woman respondents. On the whole, this chapter provides strong evidence for the generalizability of the community commitment framework outside of the same-race representation context.