Aversive racism at the ballot box: a field experiment on the effects of race and negative information in local elections

Abstract

ABSTRACT Research on the response of white voters to African American candidates has produced decidedly mixed results. I argue that methodological limitations are a major source of this perplexing array of findings and that a field experiment may help shed more light on the topic than is possible in laboratory experiments, surveys, or in post-election data analysis. Here, a field experiment embedded in two low salience school board elections in Columbus, Ohio produced a striking pattern consistent with the thrust of aversive racism research. To wit, simply being sent a mailing showing the race of a white or African American candidate had little effect on white voters. However, after being sent a mailing showing a candidate’s race and negative information about the candidate, white voters punished African American candidates more severely than white candidates with the same record. In short, people seemed to cast race-based votes only in circumstances in which they could deny race was a factor in their decision.