Candidate Education and Voting Preferences: How Voters Prefer Politicians Who Share Their Educational Background
(with Andreas Videbæk Jensen)
There is growing consensus that voters prefer higher-educated political candidates, and that this preference explains the under-representation of lower-educated politicians in parliaments across democracies. We argue, in contrast, that ingroup favoritism should lead voters to prefer political candidates with a similar education background, and that examining and explaining such same-group preference require more subtle methodological designs. We fielded four large-scale survey experiments in Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Germany where we i) presented respondents with ingroup candidates who share their educational background and ii) randomly assigned information about candidates’ competence, warmth, and policy appeal to test different causal mechanisms. We find that both higher- and lower-educated voters prefer same-group candidates, and that this preference is partly driven by inferences related to candidates' competence, warmth, and policy appeal. These findings demonstrate that in a European setting, the over-representation of higher-educated politicians in office is not driven by a universal demand.
Racial Discrimination as Trait-Based Discrimination
(with Andrew J. Latham and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen)
We introduce a new framework on direct racial discrimination—trait-based discrimination—and apply it by examining how three traits—ancestry, skin color, and class—independently and jointly shape discriminatory preferences in the US and Brazil. Using a large-scale survey experiment with more than 15,000 respondents, we find that: (i) white Americans predominantly discriminate based on ancestry, while Brazilians and Black Americans and rely more on skin color; (ii) among white Americans, ancestry functions largely as a proxy for education, which strongly shapes preferences; and (iii) only ancestry and skin color, not education, are used for racial categorization. These findings demonstrate that discrimination operates through different traits across contexts, suggest that part of white Americans’ discrimination is rooted in malleable class-based biases, and underscore the need for clearer conceptualizations of race in empirical research.
Two Discrimination Distinctions
(with Andrew J. Latham and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen)
It is common in social science to distinguish between taste-based and statistical discrimination. Taste-based discrimination occurs when a discriminator has a preference against discriminatees with a particular group identity independently of whatever other traits the discriminator believes having this group-identity is correlated with. Statistical discrimination occurs when a discriminator relies on statistical inferences about people with the discriminatee’s group identity as an indicator of whether the discriminatee has some target property in question. We argue that this distinction is conflated with a different and, so far ignored, distinction, i.e., substitute vs. non-substitute discrimination. Roughly, substitute discrimination occurs when a discriminator ceases to discriminate once they acquire more information about the discriminatee, whereas non-substitute discrimination takes place when the discriminator persists in discriminating independently of acquiring more information. Whereas the taste-based versus statistical discrimination distinction is drawn based on the nature of the motivating state of the discriminator, the substitute versus non-substitute discrimination distinction is drawn based on another dimension, i.e., the effect of changes in the information available to the discriminator. This metadistinction between two distinctions between different kinds of discrimination is important, in part because it affects what we can infer from data indicating change or constancy in people’s discriminatory behaviour when supplied with additional information, in part because it deepens our understanding of the morality of discrimination. Most importantly in the latter respect, it alerts us to the possibility that our concern for non-discrimination is a concern for modally robust non-discrimination.
Childhood Socialization or Labeling? Disentangling Barriers to Immigrant Integration
(with Andreas Videbæk Jensen)
How do the formative years shape the political and civic integration of immigrants? We bridge theories on political socialization and boundary-making to propose and examine three potential barriers to integration: Immigrants arrive with formative experiences rooted in a different society (direct exposure), they cannot draw on the same stock of parental host-country capital that benefits their native-born peers (indirect exposure), and they are labeled as outsiders simply in virtue of being born abroad (labeling). To test these potential barriers, we collected data on more than 120,000 immigrant and descendants' voting behavior in the Danish municipality election in 2021 and linked our data to the Danish registries to access naturalization rates. Using within-family sibling comparisons and a regression discontinuity design, we find that longer exposure to the country of origin substantially reduces immigrants' turnout and naturalization rates, that greater parental exposure to the country of residence prior to birth increases descendants’ turnout and naturalization thus demonstrating the importance of parents' host-country capital, and that simply being labeled an “immigrant” has no impact on turnout but substantially reduces the likelihood of acquiring Danish citizenship. These findings advance a multidimensional model of immigrant incorporation that combines formative exposure and the power of social labels to further our understanding of immigrant integration in Europe.
Early Experiences with Economic Hardship and Political Trust in Adulthood
(with Francesco Colombo, Peter Thisted Dinesen, and Kim Mannemar Sønderskov)