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Skin Tone and the Moderating Effect of Partisanship on Assessments of Elected Officials of Color

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Abstract

We explore whether the effects of colorism on evaluations of politicians is moderated by shared partisanship. We hypothesize that colorism will lead Whites to rate darker elected officials of color more poorly. Additionally, we hypothesize that partisanship will moderate this relationship with Whites being less likely to engage in colorism when evaluating co-partisans. We test our hypotheses using a crowd-sourced measure of skin tone based on the Massey-Martin index and the 2016, 2018, and 2020 Congressional Election Studies. We find that darker-skinned elected officials of color from a different party receive less support among Whites. In contrast, we find that skin tone does not influence support for co-partisan elected officials of color. Additional analysis demonstrates that the effect of colorism on evaluation of out-group partisans is strongest for Whites who score high on a racial conservatism measure.

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Data Availability

Replication Data available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/V5ZU4D.

Notes

  1. For our purposes, out-partisans refers to individuals who do not share the partisanship of their U.S. House Representative.

  2. We focus on elected officials of color in this study. However, we also collected data on the skin tone of White elected officials. Analysis in the Online Appendix demonstrates that skin tone is not a predictor of approval for White Members of Congress.

  3. While to our knowledge the CES does not provide respondents with photos of their representative, it does ask them to identify the U.S. House Representative’s race/ethnicity. 81% of White respondents in our sample are correctly able to identify their representative as a person of color. If we subset our sample to only include those who know the race of their representative, we arrive at similar results (see Online Appendix).

  4. In the Online Appendix, we show that skin tone is a marginally significant predictor (P < .10) for Black and Latino/a Elected officials. Demonstrating, that while a statistically weaker effect given the smaller sample sizes when disaggregating by the race of the elected official, the effect of skin tone on approval appears to be consistent across the largest two racial/ethnic minority groups in Congress.

  5. We keep independents in our analysis, because in spite of their party label, many behave similar to partisans in their political actions (See Klar & Krupnikov, 2016; Smidt, 2017). We arrive at the same results if we remove non-partisan leaning political independents.

  6. We arrive at the same results if we dichotomize the four point approval rating scale into 0 = “Disapprove” and 1 = ”Approve” and estimate a logit regression or run an OLS Regression. We also arrive at the same conclusions if we estimate an ordered logit regression model without random effects. See Online Appendix for results.

  7. See the Online Appendix for a baseline model between skin tone and approval for co- and out-partisans. Unlike the models in the paper, these relationships are statistically insignificant. However, there is a significant and negative relationship between skin tone and approval ratings in estimations which only control for individual level characteristics for out-partisans.

  8. In the Online Appendix we show that neither Black nor Latino/a respondents’ use skin tone in their evaluation of elected officials regardless of their partisanship or the elected official’s race.

  9. We arrive at the same results if we combine the variables using principal component factor analysis in which the two variables load on a single variable with an eigenvalue of 1.53.

  10. In comparison to the racial resentment measure, which is focused on African Americans, this measure more broadly measures attitudes about people of color.

  11. In the Supplementary Appendix, we re-estimate this model using individual scores on the racial conservatism scale.

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Funding

Research funding for this project was made available by internal support from Oregon State University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    Christopher Stout

  2. John G. Tower Center for Political Studies, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA

    Danielle Casarez Lemi

  3. School of Public Policy, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    Katarina Bosworth

  4. Law School, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA

    Ivy Chase

  5. Law School, University of Maine, Orono, ME, USA

    Jazzmynn Kiefer

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Correspondence to Christopher Stout.

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Stout, C., Lemi, D.C., Bosworth, K. et al. Skin Tone and the Moderating Effect of Partisanship on Assessments of Elected Officials of Color. Polit Behav (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-024-09922-0

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