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The Face of American Government: Effects of Racial and Ethnic Firsts on Minority Perceptions of Government Responsiveness

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Abstract

What effect does seeing a member of a historically marginalized group in high-level office have on attitudes toward government among those who identify with that group? We hypothesize that, when salient, increased descriptive representation will increase feelings of government responsiveness among members of historically marginalized groups. Moreover, we hypothesize that this effect will persist even when substantive representation is not expected, that is, when the official is viewed as unlikely to represent the individual's own political interests. We explore this theory by taking advantage of two exogenous changes in descriptive representation: the election of the first African–American president, Barack Obama, and the confirmation of the first Latino on the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor. Using panel data and a difference-in-differences design, we analyze within-person changes in attitudes toward government among African–Americans and Latinos, from before to after these events. In doing so, we attempt to separate descriptive from anticipated substantive representation.

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Notes

  1. Based on a study of 35,000 articles in major media outlets between Feb. 9, 2009 and Aug. 9, 2009, “more than a third of all the coverage that dealt with Hispanic people or issues was about Sotomayor’s nomination” (see Pew Research Center 2009, for details). Additionally, about half of the stories about Sotomayor mentioned that she was Hispanic/Latina. To the extent that her ethnicity was not explicitly named, the widely cited reference to her comments about “wise Latinas” and her last name also served as a signal of Hispanic heritage. That said, coverage of the Supreme Court is relatively limited (e.g., Flemming et al. 1997).

  2. See http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/Downloads/NAES/OnlineSurvey/NAES08-Online-Codebook.pdf for a full discussion of NAES 2008 panel response rates. The percentage of Wave 1 cases who completed all 5 waves was 54.6 percent. The average cumulative response rate CUMRR1 across the 5 waves was 8.92 percent. The response rate for the Sotomayor study was similarly in single digits, but this sample was purposely stratified to produce roughly equal numbers of Latinos and non-Latino whites.

  3. The retention rate between waves 1 and 5 was similar across racial groups: Whites, 67.7%; African Americans, 64.3%.

  4. See Appendix 3 for supplemental fixed effects analyses within Democrats and non-Democrats.

  5. A similar effect was found when dividing the sample into Democrats and non-Democrats. Democrats increased their Perceived Government Responsiveness more following her confirmation than did non-Democrats (t = 2.31, p < .05). But more importantly for our purposes, the interaction between Spanish Dominant Latinos and Time remained statistically significant (t = 2.39; p < .05) when including partisan identity in the model (see Appendix 5).

  6. 2012 interviews were conducted from October 19–29.

  7. The measure of Perceived Government Responsiveness used in the analyses of the 2012 data includes four out of the original five items. One of the items (“How much do you feel that political parties help to make the government pay attention to what the people think?”) was not included in the 2012 survey and therefore was dropped from both pre and post measures in the analysis of long-term effects in Table 3.

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  1. University of Michigan, 426 Thompson Street, 4412, Ann Arbor, MI, 48104-2321, USA

    Mara C. Ostfeld

  2. University of Pennsylvania, 133 S. 36th Street, 426, Philadelphia, PA, 19104-6215, USA

    Diana C. Mutz

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Correspondence to Mara C. Ostfeld.

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We thank Chelsea Schaefer for her invaluable contributions to this paper. Replication data for the analyses reported in this paper can be found at the Political Behavior Dataverse page: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FUVGCM.

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Ostfeld, M.C., Mutz, D.C. The Face of American Government: Effects of Racial and Ethnic Firsts on Minority Perceptions of Government Responsiveness. Polit Behav 43, 423–449 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09664-9

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