Intersectional Stereotypes : How Gender, Race, and Partisan Stereotypes Interact in Evaluations of Political Candidates

The experiences of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential primaries raised important questions for scholars regarding how stereotypes based on race and gender can impact voters' perceptions of candidate traits and viability. Further reflection on this momentous election also points to a gap in the political candidate evaluation literature — an acknowledgement of intersectional identities and how they may influence voter evaluations of political candidates. While the political science literature is replete with scholarship about gender or racial stereotypes, almost no research examines how these stereotypes interact, and how evaluations of black women candidates, for example, might differ from white women or black men. This study uses an experiment to fill this gap and ask how race, gender, and party stereotypes interact to shape evaluations of hypothetical candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives. Our results are surprising, and indicate that while black candidates receive an electoral disadvantage, especially among Republicans, they are advantaged on several other evaluation measures, including personal traits and some policy issues. Similarly, women of both parties are rated similarly, though women receive a slight disadvantage among Republicans. Overall, our findings indicate that intersectional stereotypes do exist and that candidate evaluation studies that treat race, gender, and party as separate, independent variables may be incomplete