Why Do We Use Race and Gender When Policy Information is Available? A Theory of the Development of Political Categorization Schemes
Year: 2009
Type: preprint
Abstract: It is well-known that voters use cues such as a politician's race, gender, or party to infer the politician's positions on various issues, but relatively little is known about what factors influence the use of such cues. Furthermore, what we do know emphasizes individual citizens' traits or features of a given election. In this paper I develop a formal information-processing model based on categorization psychology to investigate the impact of environmental factors such as the balance of male vs. female politicians on the organization of voters' belief systems. There are two central predictions. First, intuitively, people rely more on cues such as gender or party the more correlated they are with policy positions. Second, increased balance between genders, races, or even political parties reduces voters' reliance on these cues. These predictions are borne out by data on House elections from the American National Election Studies Cumulative Data File.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Author: Nathan A. Collins
Institution: Santa Fe Institute
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1510069236