A Natural Experiment on Discrimination in Elections

ANaturalExperimentonDiscriminationinElections⇤ David E. Broockman Evan J. Soltas UC Berkeley MIT May 5, 2020 Abstract We exploit a natural experiment to study discrimination in elections. In Illinois Republican presidential primaries, voters vote for delegates bound to presidential candidates, but delegates’ names convey information about their race and gender. We identify discrimination from variation in vote totals among delegates bound to the same presidential candidate and who face the same voters. Examining delegate vote totals from 2000 to 2016, we estimate nonwhite delegates receive 9 percent fewer votes. We find essentially no gender discrimination. Negligible incentives for statistical discrimination, costs to preferred presidential candidates, and heterogeneity are consistent with an interpretation of this behavior as taste-based. Keywords: Racial Discrimination, Voter Behavior, Taste-Based Discrimination JEL Codes: D72, J15 ⇤Broockman: UC Berkeley ([email protected]). Soltas: MIT Department of Economics (es- [email protected]). We are grateful to Dave Wasserman for the news article that served as inspiration for this study. We thank the editor Thomas Fujiwara and the anonymous referees for their comments and sugges- tions. For helpful feedback, we thank Avi Acharya, Hunt Allcott, David Autor, Tim Besley, Kate Casey, Stefano DellaVigna, Dana Foarta, Matthew Gentzkow, Don Green, Dan Ho, Saumitra Jha, Ilyana Kuziemko, Horacio Larreguy, Michael Luca, Jon Levin, Pablo Montagnes, Sergio Montero, Nicola Persico, Ken Shotts, Erik Snowberg, Jorg Spenkuch, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Francesco Trebbi, Ebonya Washington, Ismail White, and seminar participants at LSE, the NBER, Oxford, POLMETH, Queen’s University, SPSA, Stan- ford University, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Riverside, the University of Toronto, the University of Zurich, the University of Southern California, the Wallis Institute, and Yale. For their able research assistance, we thank Hadil Almowafak, Julia Espero, Corey Garcia, Chris McConnell, Leela Srinivasan, KS Tey, and Yao Yang. Soltas gratefully acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. 1122374. 1 Introduction Racial and ethnic minorities and women are underrepresented among elected officials in many countries.1 A large body of research indicates that such underrepresentation contributes to disparities by race, ethnicity, and gender in a variety of economic and political outcomes. Electing minority or female officials has been found to reduce gaps in public goods provision (e.g., Pande, 2003; Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004), resulting in relative gains in health, education, and criminal justice (Beaman et al., 2012; Clots-Figueras, 2012; Iyer et al., 2012; Fujiwara, 2015). One potential explanation for the underrepresentation of minorities and women in elected office is voter discrimination, wherein voters are less likely to vote for a minority or female candidate than an otherwise-identical non-minority or male candidate. Understanding whether voters discriminate by race and gender and the mechanisms for any such discrimination are central questions in political economy and would inform sig- nificant policy debates. Research finds that individuals engage in racial discrimination in product and labor markets (for review, see Bertrand and Duflo, 2017), but credible evidence on whether they do so when voting is limited. On average, minorities run in di↵erent electoral districts, at di↵erent times, on di↵erent platforms, with di↵erent party affiliations, for di↵erent offices, with di↵erent pre-election experience and campaign resources, and so on, making credible identification of voter discrimination difficult in most electoral settings (Stephens-Davidowitz, 2014). In settings beyond politics, researchers have identified discrimination with a variety of credible research designs.2 However, it is challenging to adapt many of these strategies to elections. In this paper we analyze a natural experiment to study voter discrimination against nonwhite and female political candidates. This natural experiment occurred in four recent Illinois Republican presidential primary elections: 2000, 2008, 2012, and 2016.3 Unique fea- tures of the institutional environment means discrimination in these elections can plausibly be causally identified. For voters to fully express their preferences in Illinois Republican presidential primary elections, they must vote for multiple individual candidates for delegate to the Republican National Convention who appear on the primary ballot. In each congressional district in Illinois, there is a fixed number N 2, 3, 4 of delegate candidates 2{ } 1For example, in the United States as of 2015, 38 (51) percent of the population was nonwhite (female), compared to 17 (20) percent of the U.S. Congress (Manning, 2016). For brevity, in the paper we refer to non-Hispanic whites only as whites, and all other groups as nonwhites. We often use “racial discrimination” as a shorthand for racial and ethnic discrimination. 2These include audit studies (e.g., Pager et al., 2009), correspondence studies (Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2004), natural experiments (Goldin and Rouse, 2000; Price and Wolfers, 2010), and lab and field experiments (for review, see Guryan and Charles, 2013; Bertrand and Duflo, 2017). 3We use these years because relevant data was not available prior to 2000 and the 2004 Republican presidential primary was not contested, as President George W. Bush was running for renomination unopposed. 1 who appear on the ballot for each presidential candidate, and voters cast votes for up to N delegates. The top N vote-getting delegates in each district win and are bound to vote for their presidential candidate at the convention. However, the delegates’ names also appear on ballots, and the delegates’ names convey information about their race and gender. To identify racial and gender discrimination in this setting, we exploit the fact that we observe the vote totals of multiple delegates with the same platform—that is, bound to the same presidential candidate—on the same ballots, and voted on by the same voters, all of whom voters should select to fully support their preferred presidential candidate. Our identification strategy is to examine variation in delegate vote totals by delegate race and gender within such groups of delegates. For example, suppose the delegates for Mitt Romney in Illinois’ first congressional district in 2012 were named Tom, Dick, and José. To maximize the value of their ballot, a Romney supporter should cast their three votes for Tom, Dick, and José. However, to the extent Romney supporters engage in racial or ethnic discrimination, some may vote for Tom and Dick but not for José, leaving José’s vote totals lower than Tom and Dick’s vote totals. We observe 816 unique natural experiments of this form. This election design has important advantages for studying discrimination. In typical elections, voters may value myriad dimensions of candidates—such as ideology, competence, or past performance—many of which may correlate with candidate demographics and few of which are perfectly observable. Here the voter’s problem is dramatically more straightfor- ward: For voters seeking to fully support their preferred presidential candidate, a delegate candidate’s sole relevant dimension is the presidential candidate to whom they are bound,4 which is clearly printed on ballots, such that both voters and researchers can perfectly observe it. White and male delegate candidates running alongside nonwhite and female delegate candidates on the same platform, for the same office, on the same ballots, in front of the same voters therefore provide a naturally-occurring control group that allow us to rule out factors that would confound other research designs. Analyzing variation in delegate vote totals among delegates bound to the same presidential candidate and who appear on the same ballots in front of the same voters, we find that delegates receive approximately 9 percent fewer votes when their names indicate they are not white. We also find, however, essentially no discrimination against women: Delegates whose names indicate they are female receive on average about the same number of votes as delegates whose names indicate they are male, if not slightly more in some specifications. 4In Section 4.3, we consider other dimensions voters may value besides the presidential candidate to whom delegates are bound, such as if a delegate is an existing elected official, is a “local notable,” or is listed higher on the ballot. We find these dimensions are uncorrelated with delegate race. Serving as a delegate most resembles hobbyist consumption, rather than a career investment. See Appendix H for discussion, including quotes from convention delegates about why they volunteered to attend. 2 Examining the results by ethnicity, we find clear evidence of discrimination against delegates whose names indicate they are Hispanic, East Asian, Middle Eastern, or Indian. Our estimates for discrimination against black delegates are similar, although there are few clearly black delegates, making our estimates of anti-black discrimination less precise. We next consider what theoretical mechanisms could account for this discrimination. Discrimination may be taste-based—wherein voters act as if they have preferences over candidate race and gender (Becker, 1957). It may also be statistical—wherein voters accurately use candidates’ race and gender to infer non-racial

Load more