In this chapter, I introduce and explain my community commitment signaling framework and its inner workings. Despite the strong preference that scholarship explains Black voters have for politicians with roots in the Civil Rights Movement, those politicians are leaving office, making way for a newer crop of representatives. Does this mean the expectations of Black voters have shifted? If they have not, how do these younger politicians communicate that same commitment their predecessors did? I argue that they have to provide evidence of this commitment through the use of signals that convey their willingness to prioritize the group's interest above their own individual prestige. Those politicians who can provide strong, tangible evidence of this commitment are more likely to be viewed positively by Black voters.

This chapter studies the voting behavior of members of the House of Representatives. If the presence of Fox News in a district shapes potential candidates’ perceptions about district party composition and the constituency’s electoral preferences, there are good chances that the same can be said of sitting House members. Here, of course, the expectation is not about how these perceptions affect the decision to run for office; instead, they affect decisions about how to perform so as to stay in office. Much like potential candidates, sitting members of Congress have to make inferences about what their constituents want. Typically, they make these inferences based on their perceptions of the partisan composition of their district, among other considerations. If sitting members are influenced like potential candidates, Fox News might shift their perceptions in the direction of thinking their district is more right-leaning. Alternatively, based on our evidence from Chapter 3, they might feel more vulnerable to challenges from potential candidates to their (ideological) right. In either case, a reasonable expectation, which we find evidence for, is that member roll call votes will move in a rightward direction, especially among Democrats representing more competitive districts.

This chapter reviews the main points of the manuscript and discusses in detail the implications of this work. Black voters are not the only identity group for whom popular assumptions have been made. Indeed, Latinx and LGBTQ+ voters have also been subject to beliefs about how their identity informs their candidate selection. This chapter deconstructs the community commitment signaling framework to explain how it can be applied to other groups. Moreover, this chapter discusses the limitation of the community commitment signaling and invites deeper thinking about the role of racial identity in political representation.

The broader work on candidate selection often makes the case that usage of identity, particularly race, is a sign of one's lacking political sophistication. In this chapter, I explain that this belief stems from the oversimplification of the conceptualization of race as just skin color. This position ignores the social complexities of racial identity within which many Black individuals operate. Relying on existing observation data, I show that Black voters make important distinctions between politicians based on their perceptions of them as a "problem solver" or a "prestige seeker." This distinction and the subsequent evaluations hold even for Black politicians suggesting that even within the same-race representation paradigm, Black voters' desire for a politician who cares more for the group than themselves remains steadfast. This chapter sets the stage for a deeper exploration into the nuances and distinctions Black voters make between politicians, regardless of their race

In this chapter, we investigate whether Fox News’ presence in districts shaped the competitive electoral landscape by influencing potential candidates’ perceptions about the partisan make-up of the constituency in the district and shaping their perceived chances of winning or losing. Specifically, in this chapter, we test whether the entry of Fox News created the perception of a rightward shift in district party composition among potential Republican candidates considering a run in the district. We find that in districts with more Fox News availability, high-quality potential Republican candidates were more likely to challenge Democratic incumbents, especially if the districts were closely competitive.

If the conventional wisdom brought about by Obama's success with Black voters was true then community commitment signaling should not be necessary for Black politicians as the shared physical similarities should be enough to garner support from Black voters. The findings in this chapter do not support that conventional thinking. On the contrary, I find that community commitment signals are very effective for Black man politicians when the signals they use are costly ones that rely on personal sacrifice. Black woman politicians, however, are perceived to be committed without the use of signals offering important evidence of gendered differences even within the ranks of Black politicians.

This chapter investigates whether the community commitment signaling framework is only applicable to Black politicians. Much of the work that explores Black political representation focuses on the relationship that Black people have with Black politicians despite the fact that they, on average, vote for more White politicians than Black ones, especially at higher levels of office. Using the same experimental design from the two previous chapters, I look into whether Black voters' expectations for commitment only exist for politicians who look like them. I find that while the baseline preference for politicians does favor Black ones, White politicians, particularly White men politicians, who engage costly sacrificial behavior still gain Black support. White woman politicians, however, see little to no improvement in perceptions of them regardless of the signal they use. This effect is driven primarily by Black woman respondents. On the whole, this chapter provides strong evidence for the generalizability of the community commitment framework outside of the same-race representation context.

This chapter relies on a large-scale experimental test with approximately 4,200 Black respondents. The experiment is designed to assess whether certain kinds of signals from politicians influence the information Black voters glean about the politician and their subsequent evaluations. This chapter looks at the aggregate effect of the signals for the purposes of seeing what if anything certain signals do regardless of who employs them. The consistent finding from this chapter is that signals of personal sacrifice are the most effective at communicating commitment to the Black community. However, questions remain about whether the race and/or gender of the politician informs these results. Taken together, Black voters' preference for costly signals is apparent here, setting the stage for the nuance discussed in the next two chapters.

In this concluding chapter, we review our findings in the context of our initial pre-analysis plan and discuss the limitations of our studies. We then analyze the implications of our study and findings for their scholarly contributions and discuss next steps for future research. We conclude with a discussion of the normative implications of our findings. Despite the hubbub about Fox News being a bull-in-the-china shop, its effects on politicians were contingent on the context of the district they represented. Even if its effects were circumscribed, our evidence shows that the consequences were real. The implications of our findings are twofold. On the one hand, it throws some cold water on the popular notion that Fox News was a right-wing bulldozer that pulled American politics uniformly in a conservative direction. On the other hand, it makes clear that standard theoretical models of congressional behavior are founded on an assumption that, while useful, is most certainly flawed. Namely, politicians are not fully informed rational calculators. Politicians are people.

This chapter focuses on collective representation, examining whether Fox News affects how the American public is represented. Chapter 5 revealed Fox News effects on dyadic representation; we cannot assume similar effects on collective representation. Yet, in some ways, the path by which Fox News would affect collective representation is clearer than at the district-level. Because Fox News is a national outlet with a wide following, it could affect collective representation through agenda-setting. If many people across many districts regularly watch Fox News, it may draw the attention of both legislators and constituents to the same set of issues. To test for Fox News effects on collective representation, we examine whether the presence of Fox produced different policy outcomes than would have occurred in its absence. We simulate a world where Fox News does not exist in any member’s district and then compare it to the actual behavior of members of Congress given the observed levels of Fox News. The results suggest a boost for Republican policies in four of the six Congresses we examined. However, the effects are only statistically significant for one Congress, the 108th (2003–2004).