Electoral incentives and elite racial identification: Why Brazilian politicians change their race

Abstract

Scholars recognize that individuals change how they racially identify themselves over time and even from situation to situation. Politicians, however, are typically presumed to have stable, innate racial identities. In this article, I contend that politicians strategically change their self-professed race in response to electoral incentives. Using original data from Brazilian elections, I show that more than a quarter of the political candidates that competed in Brazil’s 2014 and 2016 elections changed their publicly declared race from one election to the next. My analysis indicates the racial composition of the electorate and the electoral rules that govern competition affect patterns of racial change. These results suggest that candidates “racially position” themselves as members of the racial group that provides the greatest electoral rewards. This strategic behavior calls into question extant theories which assume elite racial group membership is fixed and exogenous to electoral outcomes.