W
EAVER
2
The Color of the Campaign
I
I
N
N
T
T
R
R
O
O
D
D
U
U
C
C
T
T
I
I
O
O
N
N
&
&
T
T
H
H
E
E
O
O
R
R
E
E
T
T
I
I
C
C
A
A
L
L
F
F
R
R
A
A
M
M
E
E
W
W
O
O
R
R
K
K
As an outcome of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, vote dilution of blacks was made
illegal, and blacks were soon able to elect black candidates to office. However, only two percent
of all elected officials in the U.S. are black, while blacks make up over 12 percent of the
population.
Further exacerbating this inequality in representation, redistricting has “maxed out”
the number of minority-majority districts, ultimately placing a ceiling on the number of minority
representatives. However, few studies have focused on the intellectual and practical puzzle of
why, despite the legislation enacted to alleviate barriers to minority voting, minorities have been
underrepresented in office. The fact that black candidates are disadvantaged by at-large elections
has been well documented. But why black candidates don’t receive the support of white voters
has been almost completely ignored.
There has been no systematic study of the role of race and skin color in perceptions of
political candidates and voting decisions. Black office-seekers experience a wide discrepancy
between the vote they receive in exit polls and the actual vote.
In addition, the fact that all of
the black governors and senators to date have been light-skinned has been treated as an
unexplained coincidence. It is the ambition of this study to move beyond these simple
observations by directly testing the effects of skin color and race on candidate preferences with
the use of a survey experiment.
1
Bositis, David A. Black elected officials: a statistical summary: 1993-1997. Washington, D.C.: Joint Center for
Political and Economic Studies, 1998.
2
Finkel, Steven E., Thomas M. Guterbock, and Marian J. Borg. “Race-of-Interviewer Effects in a Preelection Poll:
Virginia 1989,” Public Opinion Quarterly 55:3 (Autumn 1991), 313-330.
Convention