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Prejudice, Strategic Discrimination, and the Electoral Connection: Evidence from a Pair of Field Experiments in Brazil
Author(s) -
Driscoll Amanda,
Cepaluni Gabriel,
Guimarães Feliciano de Sá,
Spada Paolo
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
american journal of political science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.347
H-Index - 170
eISSN - 1540-5907
pISSN - 0092-5853
DOI - 10.1111/ajps.12371
Subject(s) - incentive , prejudice (legal term) , legislature , socioeconomic status , political science , affect (linguistics) , social psychology , field (mathematics) , scale (ratio) , race (biology) , demographic economics , psychology , economics , sociology , microeconomics , gender studies , law , geography , mathematics , pure mathematics , population , demography , cartography , communication
Can electoral incentives mitigate racial and class prejudices toward underrepresented groups? We use a pair of large‐scale field experiments to investigate the responsiveness of Brazilian legislative candidates to information requests from fictitious voters before and after the 2010 elections. Our panel study design allows us to examine how politicians’ electoral incentives and prejudices jointly affect their responsiveness to voters with randomly assigned socioeconomic and partisan characteristics. Distinguishing between prejudiced and strategic discrimination in responsiveness, we find that socioeconomically privileged and competitive candidates are equally responsive to underrepresented voters in advance of the election, yet less responsive once in office.