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.
What Makes Discrimination Racial? A Trait-Based Account Applied in the United States and Brazil
(with Andrew J. Latham and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen)
Most observers agree that racial discrimination is pervasive, but exactly when and how is discrimination racial? We introduce the concept of racial trait-based discrimination to formalize when direct discrimination is racial. We then apply this trait-based approach to examine how three specific traits—ancestry, skin color, and class—independently and jointly underlie discrimination in the United States and Brazil. Using an innovative survey experiment among 15,000 respondents, we find that the traits underpinning discrimination vary: White Americans discriminate primarily on ancestry, Black Americans and Brazilians on skin color, whereas all discriminate on educational attainment. Further, among White Americans, much of the ancestry-based discrimination reflects that ancestry is used as a proxy for education. We illustrate how different theories of race lead to different interpretations of the results as evidence of racial trait-based discrimination and discuss how white Americans’ seemingly racial discrimination may not be solely racial in nature.
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.
Two Discrimination Distinctions
(with Andrew J. Latham and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen)
Early Experiences with Economic Hardship and Political Trust in Adulthood
(with Francesco Colombo, Peter Thisted Dinesen, and Kim Mannemar Sønderskov)