Viable Candidate Oversupply: Black Voters, Safe Congressional Districts, and Primary Elections Restricted; Files Only

Abstract

Studying Black vote choice in safe majority-Black congressional districts is difficult because few districts have competitive general elections. This means the dominant party’s primary election determines who serves in Congress. However, studying vote choice in primary elections is difficult because voters know little about each candidate, and important cues do not provide meaningful information. I propose a two-stage voting model, viable candidate oversupply, which argues that Black voters first strategically locate top-performing or viable candidates using consensus cues. Black voters then add these candidates to their decision set and winnow poor-performing candidates from consideration. In the second stage, Black voters use their ideological orientation to vote for a candidate in their decision set. However, the candidate’s race determines the significance of ideology. Suppose only Black candidates are in a voter’s decision set. In that case, they make purely ideological decisions, but if there is a non-Black candidate in a voter's decision set, they must balance desires for descriptive representation and ideological preferences.

The evidence put forth in this dissertation supports my theory. I begin with a discussion of the candidates who run and who win in these districts, and then I provide evidence that voters rely heavily on consensus cues to choose candidates. In addition, I provide causal evidence for both stages of my theory. In the first stage, I present evidence that Black voters winnow poor-performing candidates. Using a randomized experiment, I show that voters consolidated to the viable candidate. In addition, consensus cues coming from all voters in the district were more effective than consensus cues from only Black voters. In the second stage, I provide evidence for ingroup and outgroup decision sets. In ingroup decision sets, I present results from a conjoint experiment showing that social welfare policy had the most significant effect on vote share. The results also suggest that this effect was driven by self-reported liberal respondents. In outgroup elections, I show that Black voters reject Black conservative candidates but will be indifferent between a moderate or liberal Black candidate. Illustrating that ideology plays an important role in the second stage of my model.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Viable Candidate Oversupply: A 2-Stage Cognitive Voting Model 13

3 Who Runs and Who Wins? Candidate Emergence and Success 49

4 Viability and Vote Choice: Black Voters and Low Information Electoral Environment 87

5 Viable Candidate Oversupply: Empirical Evidence Using Sequential Experiments 121

6 Limits of Racial Cues: Black Vote Choice When Racial Cues are Salient 159

7 Conclusion: The Future of Voting in Majority-Black Jurisdictions 185

Appendix 195

Bibliography 219

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Political Science
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Political Science, General
Stichwort	Strategic and Sincere Voters Congressional Primary Elections Black Vote Choice Safe Districts
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Andra Gillespie, Emory University
Committee Members	Michael Leo Owens, Emory University Bernard Fraga, Emory University

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