The goal of this book was to dispel the conventional wisdom about the overly simplistic way that Black voters choose who will represent them. The success of Barack Obama led many to believe that Black voters would vote for anyone who looked like them and was a Democrat. However, as time has gone by, this has not only proven to be untrue, but the influence and power of the Black electorate has become more apparent, making understanding how and why certain politicians, are selected by Black voters all the more imperative. By leveraging an original theoretical framework and testing it using both observational and a novel experimental design, I am able to show the extremely strategic nature of Black voters’ candidate selection process. At the root of their decisions is the desire to optimize their political power through representation. Black voters have been forced to navigate a political system that was never meant to work for them and have in the midst of that created a system of assessment that allows them to select who they perceive to be the best suited to assist in meeting the community’s goal of greater sociopolitical inclusion.

The community commitment signaling framework argues that Black voters prefer politicians who show a history of prioritizing the group’s needs above their own prestige and personal interest. Much of what we know about how Black people decide who they are going to support comes from political science literature and conventional wisdom that disregards the kinds of expectations that Black people have for potential representatives. Oftentimes, the conversation about Black voter candidate selection, particularly of same-race representatives, includes discussions of perceived trustworthiness and potential racial authenticity. However, it does not speak to what it is that Black voters, as strategic political actors, expect from those trying to represent them, and it is here, I posit, that we miss an opportunity to delve into the nuances of how and why certain politicians are chosen by Black voters over others. The work presented in this book offers the ability to explore and explain that nuance in meaningful ways, and to unpack how the expectations Black voters have fostered over generations informs how those politicians ultimately obtain the support from this highly powerful and influential voting bloc.

The conventional wisdom around Black voter candidate selection relies on skin color as a key indicator for Black voters, arguing that if a candidate looks like Black voters, they are more likely to get their support over to White politicians. The community commitment signaling framework does not directly refute the importance of same-race representation but argues that the reliance on skin color as the chief explanation oversimplifies the role of race in Black people’s political decision-making process. The assumption that skin color is the only means that Black voters have to make their representational choices promotes the belief of a lack of political sophistication that prompts individuals to undervalue and underestimate Black voters. Moreover, scholars across various social science disciplines have repeatedly explained that race, like gender and sexuality, is a social construct with both physical and social components. By focusing solely on the physical attributes of one’s racial identity as a way to understand how Black voters make these choices, we are unable to address instances why White candidates, such as President Joe Biden or Congressional Representative Steve Cohen, are more successful than Black candidates. However, if we explore the social expectations Black voters have for potential representatives, we are better equipped to be able to understand instances where we see Black voters deviating from the conventional wisdom and, more importantly, able to explain why.

Summation of Findings

The expectation for community commitment does not come out of this contemporary political moment, nor is it the byproduct of having had a Black president, but rather something that finds its roots in the Reconstruction Era and before. In Chapter 1, I investigate the historical narratives of Black individuals who were chosen as representatives of the Black community. Throughout much of the history of Black people in the United States, particularly within the political domain, there was a high amount of political violence, a lack of access to resources, pandering, and other nefarious acts perpetrated against Black individuals. Thus, Black voters emerged from these various historical moments with high levels of political distrust and skepticism. They had to, in turn, develop a barometer for whether the claims made by politicians were true. Throughout the Reconstruction, Interwar, and Civil Rights eras, Black voters learned that the most effective representatives were those who placed their own well-being behind the needs of the group. This came from the fact that Black people’s expectations were not only for those who sought to represent them, but for every Black person who sought to better the position of the group. During these moments in history, Black citizens had to make numerous sacrifices of the physical and financial kind in hopes of bringing progress to their communities. Through protesting, boycotting, and other acts of defiance in the face of the hierarchical White supremacist structure, Black voters who moved against the status quo, even in the slightest ways, stood to lose everything.

In Chapter 1, I explain that Black people understood very clearly that the only way forward was to sacrifice one’s safety and security, which we see very clearly in the actions of Reconstruction-era politicians who were constantly run out of their homes by White supremacist vigilantes and policemen because they were not supporting the issues that those White individuals wanted them to support. Moreover, during the interwar years, Black citizens engaged in uprisings pushing back against the rampant racially fueled violence that was brought about by White people across the country. It is here, I posit, that we are finding the foundation of community commitment. The desire for one’s commitment to prioritizing the group’s needs does not simply come from those people who represented the racial group, but from Black people’s own historical experiences of sacrifice on numerous dimensions.

Those experiences apprise their understandings of what is effective to bring about change in their individual lives and within the Black community. Put another way, Black people do not have expectations for politicians that they do not have for others who claim to care about the racial group’s progress. In fact, they are merely looking for evidence that those politicians seeking out their support are willing to engage in the sacrificial behaviors that have brought Black people to this current political time. This recognition of the power of sacrifice is most clearly seen during the Civil Rights Movement, where were a civil rights activist, many of whom would ultimately become politicians such as John Lewis whose work led to strong and meaningful changes for Black Americans. These moments over time, I contend built a kind of association between sacrifice and the potential for a meaningful shift in one’s lived experiences and political circumstance.

In Chapter 2, I ask: How do politicians who are not of the civil rights era convey their commitment to putting the group’s needs above their own? I argue that those politicians who do not have the history of the Civil Rights Movement in their political toolkit signal their commitment through their rhetorical appeals to the racial group. Drawing on signaling theory, I contend that these signals used by politicians are sent to Black voters to convey underlying information about their commitment to the Black community. They serve to show Black individuals whether or not the politician is going to be able to meet the group’s expectation for commitment to group prioritization. In this book, I focus on two community commitment signals – social connections and personal sacrifice. I argue that those politicians who engage in personal sacrifice appeals convey a realized commitment to the group because they are relying on past actions of sacrifice that have already taken place for the group. This form of commitment, I posit, is the most preferable as it removes the guesswork about whether a politician is going to be able to do what is expected of them because they have already done it. However, not every politician does not have sacrifices for the racial group in their personal narrative, and for those, I posit they use social connections signals that rely on associations within prominent individuals, institutions, or signals within the racial group. These signals are weaker because they have a higher potential to simply cheap talk. Thus, when a politician relies on these connections, Black voters require higher levels of proof in terms of one’s accountability to determine their potential commitment.

This chapter highlights the reality that, above all, Black voters are seeking to strategically optimize their political position by choosing politicians who are less likely to simply be pandering. Given their history with political lies, as discussed in Chapter 1, Black voters’ desire for community commitment is more than a simple wish for a good representative but is a deep need to ensure they will not be left behind once they have put their weight behind a politician. By choosing those with a history of sacrifice for the group, Black voters have effectively stacked the deck in their favor and ensured optimal representation. Descriptive representation literature tends to overlook the influence of Black voters’ preexisting expectations for those politicians who want their support. Instead, it places a stronger focus on the outcomes of trust, political efficacy, and perceptions of candidates’ willingness to engage with constituents to bring home needed resources to districts. While these outcomes are important and give us needed information about the preference Black voters have for same-race representatives, larger questions loom about the universal applicability of these presumptions for all Black representatives.

In the third chapter, I tackle this inquiry by using observational data with large, nationally representative samples of Black Americans, focusing much of my analysis on the 1996 National Black Election Study (NBES). The 1996 NBES allows me to look at how Black individuals who are represented by Black politicians evaluate their representatives differently than those who are not. The analysis in this chapter affirms that there is a strong preference for in-group representation, but that preference is not without strong caveats. Black voters’ lack of political trust and skepticism is not washed away by a politician who shares their racial identity. Their preference for descriptive representation is not so absolute that they are willing to overlook the potential that even a politician who looks like them could choose their self-interest over the groups’ needs. This fact is made most clearly in my analysis where I find that, across a number of datasets, no more than 40 percent of Black individuals in those samples, believed that they should always vote for Black politicians when they run. This finding alone affirms this book’s broad claim that there is more to the story than just a preference for someone who looks like them, community commitment is the metric I contend Black voters use to determine who to support.

Though none of the existing datasets have a measure that captures community commitment as I conceptualize it, I am able to operationalize it by investigating the perception of a politician as a problem solver or a prestige seeker. Again, the community commitment signaling framework contends that Black voters want a politician who will prioritize the group’s needs above their own individual needs or prestige. I find strong evidence that when a politician is perceived to be a prestige seeker, they are evaluated lower than those who are not. Providing strong evidence not causal, but strong evidence that those politicians that the role of race is more complicated within the realm of descriptive representation than we might be led to believe. And then what some conclusions of the work within descriptive representation might lead us to believe.

While the findings of this chapter provide a solid foundation to understand some of the intricacies of Black voter candidate preference, the need for further investigation persists. There are methodological issues with the usage of observational data, particularly one of indigeneity as we are unable to effectively discern why Black politicians receive the positive evaluations. Is it the product of something that the politicians did when they were in office? Or because of something that they did prior to getting into office that led to their positive assessment? Moreover, many, if not most of the politicians in the data set are incumbents meaning that they have a particular advantage of notoriety and resources that might also that might also inform how their Black constituents view and assess them. Thus, the findings in this chapter do not adequately answer the question of what considerations Black voters make or tell a causal story about the role and the perception of prestige seeking in their evaluations.

Chapters 4 through 6, I address this empirical quandary by relying on novel experimental data that includes responses from about 4,200 Black respondents. The experiment allows me to tell a much more convincing causal story about community commitment as the mechanism that explains why certain politicians are preferred by Black voters. Moreover, these chapters provide a direct test of my claims that those politicians who are seen as more committed are more likely to receive positive evaluations often associated with descriptive representatives.

In Chapter 4, I test the main effects of community commitment signaling by aggregating my findings based on the race and gender of the politicians. With this novel experimental design, I am able to establish that usage of language that references to past sacrifices does in fact communicate a realized commitment that leads politicians to be consistently more positively evaluated than those politicians who do not embed their commitment signal in their appeals. However, I also find that those politicians who rely on signals of connection to either an individual or institution are not seen as more likely to be committed in the future.

These aggregate findings offer the first look at how the community commitment signaling framework operates by evincing that Black voters do actually glean the information of commitment from the signals used by politicians. By bringing together the literature from signaling theory and the strong preference for civil rights leaders, this chapter allows us to see very clearly why politicians such as Eleanor Holmes Norton, John Lewis, and Elijah Cummings were preferred by Black voters. The sacrifices they made for the racial group were ones that carried meaning with Black Americans in very significant ways as they led to a much greater level of inclusion into the sociopolitical arena. Per my expectation, despite the time removed from the formal Civil Rights Movement, Black participants provided politicians whose appeals included references to past sacrifices for the group were more positively evaluated relative to when a politician did not signal their commitment. These findings highlight the continued importance of sacrifice for the racial group connecting it to the historical sacrifices that Black people made themselves as citizens but also that they saw those people representing them politically also make.

However, what this chapter does not clarify is whether these findings are connected to the race and or gender of the politicians. Put another way, is the race or gender of the politician driving the effect of the personal sacrifice signals leading to more positive evaluations? Are Black politicians more likely to be seen as committed relative to their White counterparts? Moreover? Does the gender of a politician even within race alter how their commitment is perceived?

In Chapter 5, I investigate how Black individuals evaluate Black politicians based on their community commitment signals. The results of this chapter work as a direct test of the descriptive representation literature, which argues that, on average and relative to White politicians, Black voters, prefer Black politicians. These compelling findings undergird the conventional wisdom and conclusions about how Black voters use race in their representational decision-making. The results of previous work might lead some to believe that regardless of what signals a Black politician sends, if they send them at all, their evaluations, all things being equal, will be the same. However, the findings in this chapter consistently affirm that when a Black representative relies on signals of sacrifice, relative to some not using community commitment, they are more likely to be seen as committed in the past, present, and future leading to more positive affective evaluations by Black respondents.

This chapter also explores the role that gender plays in the efficacy of community commitment signals, and finds that relative to Black man politicians, Black women are evaluated very differently. Indeed, those respondents who were exposed to a Black woman politician appealing to the Black community were more likely to see her as committed to prioritizing the group even when she used no community commitment signal. Moreover, while the work within descriptive representation might suggest that this belief is driven by Black women, I find that both Black men and women believe Black woman politicians to be more committed without any evidence to their realized or potential commitment. I contend this gendered difference in perceptions of commitment is born from the group’s understanding of Black women’s role within the Black community as one that requires sacrifice. Distinct from their Black man counterparts, Black women are expected to make sacrifices for the group and have, historically, done so without much in the way of acclaim or acknowledgment. To that end, Black individuals require no evidence about Black women’s commitment, it is seen as something that is part of Black womanhood.

While some might see this as good news for Black woman candidates of which the number running for office continues to rise, I take a more somber view. These elevated expectations held for Black women means, relative to their other politicians, that Black woman politicians have little room for error. If they do anything that might be perceived as working against the group the higher standard of commitment to which they are held means they have higher from which to fall. An example of this is found in the assessments of Kamala Harris whose prosecutorial background was often leveraged against her despite the fact many of her other opponents also had made past decisions that had negatively affected the Black community and other communities of color. It is difficult to say whether this gendered dynamic will persist or, with the increase in Black women running for office the ideals surrounding the expectations of commitment will shift to be more equitable between Black man and woman office seekers. As it stands, these findings highlight the important role of intersectionality and the social dynamics within the Black community and they both inform how Black woman politicians operate both inside and outside political office.

Despite the strong evidence that was shown in the previous chapters, much of that has focused on the relationship Black people have with same-race representatives. Questions still remain about whether my claims about the generalizability of community commitment signaling outside of same-race representation hold. In other words, can perceptions of White politicians shift based on their usage of community commitment signals, or is the efficacy of the signals confined to the descriptive representation paradigm? In Chapter 6, I find consistent evidence that White man politicians are more likely to be seen as committed when they invoke their physical sacrifices for the racial group and enjoy the positive evaluations that come along with those perceptions. Importantly, whereas Black man politicians could also convey their realized commitment by citing their financial sacrifices for the racial group, White politicians only see meaningful changes in perceptions of their commitment when they engage in the costliest, physical sacrifice. I posit that this stems from the high levels of distrust that Black voters have for White politicians and the desire to remove as much guesswork as possible as it relates to the politician’s intentions to prioritize the group’s interests.

Again, however, gender plays an integral part on how community commitment signals operate. Indeed, I find that White woman politicians have a much harder time garnering any level of success. Even though they are perceived to be committed to the racial group when they engage in the costliest signal of personal sacrifice, those perceptions do not, as they have done for other politicians, manifest as positive affective evaluations. However, unlike with perceptions of Black women where Black man and woman participants were agreed in their perceptions of her commitment, there is a much starker difference in their perceptions of White woman politicians. Black women are much less likely to see a White woman politician as committed to prioritizing the interests of the racial group, regardless of the signals that she sends.

Conversely, Black men are not as critical relative to Black woman respondents and see commitment when the White woman politician engages in costly sacrificial behavior. This gender difference, I contend is the byproduct of another historically grounded distinction being made about politicians on the grounds of their gender. Black and White women have, for over a century, navigating sharing a gender identity while also dealing with the high amounts of unease as a result of their racial differences. The findings in this chapter buttress one of the main contentions in this book, which is that, for many Black people, history is a stepping stone for contemporary social and political interactions and attitudes. The intersection of race and gender is meaningful, both in terms of the efficacy of the signals and for whom they are efficacious.

When we consider politicians such as Elizabeth Warren, who worked very hard, during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, to appeal to the Black community. She offered numerous policies and set an agenda meant to address the rampant inequities Black people face while also lifting the Black community up economically. However, these initiatives did little to nothing to move the Black electorate closer to supporting her. Our understandings of substantive representation would suggest that Black people’s refusal to support a candidate with such strong policy platforms is counterintuitive. But when we account for the fact that Black people have been promised many things by way of policy, their skepticism even in the face of Warren’s proposals becomes clearer.

The results in Chapter 6 provide us with a true first look at how Black voters evaluate White politicians. Traditionally, Black candidate selection has been discussed only in the context of descriptive representation meaning we know very little about how or why Black voters support certain White politicians, despite the fact that the majority of those individuals running for higher levels of office tend to be White. The question posed in Chapter 6 was whether the community commitment signaling framework was one that could be generalized outside of the same-race representation paradigm. The answer was proven to be “yes,” but with some caveats, namely gender. White politicians have a higher hill to climb because there is no reason for Black voters to believe that they will be committed to the racial group’s interests. While Black politicians may share the inclination to choose self-interests over group interests, the use of social sanctions has been shown to be very effective in keeping this behavior at bay. Sanctions do not operate the same way for out-group representatives, which requires a higher hurdle to clear. This text concludes with this chapter where I detail the findings of each chapter and discuss their generalizability and implications for the American political landscape.

Community Commitment Beyond the Black Community

This book focuses on Black Americans’ candidate selection process, but they are certainly not the only marginalized group who fall victim to the conventional wisdom surrounding how they choose their representatives. Indeed, groups such as the LGBTQ+ and Latinx communities are assumed to select politicians who share identities with them. This was made most apparent in the 2020 presidential Democratic Primary where Pete Buttigieg was expected, as the first out gay man running for the office, to garner a significant portion of the LGBTQ+ vote (Hook Reference Hook2019; Grossfeld Reference Grossfeld2020). However, according to a novel poll done by Out Magazine with a large sample of self-identified LGBTQ+ voters, Buttigieg did not garner the expected support. Instead, Elizabeth Warren was rated higher amongst queer voters (Hicklin Reference Hicklin2020). Some within the queer community contended that Buttigieg was not “queer enough,” and they did not feel represented by him as a result (Lang 2019).

Similarly, Julian Castro ran in the Democratic Primary and was met with similar expectations as a Latino candidate. Many believed that he would amass a large amount of the Latino Democratic vote, which would catapult him to the front of the Democratic candidates, but he was unsuccessful in this pursuit (Bacon Reference Bacon2019; Jervis Reference Jervis2019; Gonzalez-Sobrino 2020). Buttigieg and Castro join the numerous Black politicians discussed throughout this book to illustrate the reality that the role of identity is much more complicated than pundits, politicians, and political enthusiasts tend to believe.

Taken together, the misunderstandings surrounding the role of identity in marginalized voters’ candidate selection process are not confined to the Black community. Similarly, the framework outlined and tested in this book, though centered on Black Americans, offers the ability to dive into the nuances of how these groups determine who they will support. In the previous chapters, I drew on the unique historical narrative of Black Americans to understand how they arrived at their expectations for those who seek to represent them. I use those expectations to determine the kinds of signals that would be most effective at communicating to Black voters a candidate’s ability to prioritize the interests and needs of the group above their own. For those seeking to use this framework on other marginalized groups there is a similar necessity to rely on their unique sociopolitical narratives to understand their expectations and, from there, extrapolate the signals that would be the most effective.

I do not claim, however, that the signals used in this book for Black people will be the same for other groups. Moreover, it is not my contention that finding the kinds of signals that will work for other groups is a simple task. Indeed, Black Americans present the optimal case to test the validity of the framework because of the strong social and political solidarity many within the racial group have. The treatment of the group in, both historical and contemporary contexts, has fostered a strong connection between Black individuals on a myriad of dimensions that elicits similar political behavior for many Black people in certain social and political arenas. This level of group solidarity is harder to find in other politically marginalized groups, meaning that the signals that will meet the respective expectations of those groups will require a deeper dive into their respective histories.

There is some work that has looked at whether having a certain name (McConnaughy et al. Reference McConnaughy, White, Leal and Casellas2010), or speaking Spanish (Zárate et al. Reference Zárate, Quezada-Llanes and Armenta2023) as a Latinx candidate affects how Latinx voters perceive you. In other contexts, politicians use their Chinese names when appealing to some AAPI voters as a way to show solidarity (Yeung and Wamble n.d.). Thus, the work of drawing on the narratives of groups is not an impossibility but requires more in-depth engagement with how those groups operate within political spaces.

Another space where questions of the generalizability of this framework may arise is in the level of government in which it is applied. Methodologically, I focus much of my inquiry on congressional Democratic primaries, which might lead some to assume that community commitment is only applicable in that political context. This is not the case. I posit that Black voters’ desire for politicians committed to the community’s needs is not something that is contingent on the type of election but does shift depending on how localized the election is. Drawing on the 2014 Newark, New Jersey mayoral election between Ras Baraka and Shevar Jeffries where both candidates showed their commitment by discussing who was the “true Newarker,” in an attempt to prove their commitment to the city. This is an example of how I expect community commitment signaling to look because the expectation for commitment will not change, but who Black people want the politician to be committed to has a greater potential to come closer to home as the office becomes more local.

Most voters have the desire for a politician who is committed to prioritizing the needs of potential constituents, however, how politicians convey that commitment, and what voters are looking for as evidence of that commitment varies based on who the voters are and what political narrative, they use to inform their representational expectations. This book provides a roadmap for scholars to effectively consider what signals might look like for other groups and offers a way for us to better understand how identity, broadly construed, plays a part in these decision-making processes. For most marginalized groups, there is a strong focus on the similarities that manifest physically whether that be in skin color or to whom one is in relationship with. This framework shifts the paradigm by focusing on the social dynamics within an identity group and establishes a more nuanced understanding of how the social aspects of socially constructed identities can help unearth the complexity and sophistication within the domain of identity-driven candidate preferability.

Limitations of Community Commitment

Scholarship teaches us that there are a range of factors that play into how voters, Black and otherwise, choose their politicians. Voters employ various mental shortcuts and look for different indicators that a potential representative is worthy of their choice. Considering this work, some might question where community commitment signaling falls within these other factors. While this book highlights the importance of this important mechanism of political decision-making, it is not my contention that community commitment signaling is the only factor that voters consider. Like anything that happens in political spaces, context influences how salient certain appeals are to voters. Community commitment signals are no different. They may not be the most salient factors depending on the context of the election.

For example, in the 2020 presidential Democratic primary election, older Black voters in the South handed now President Joe Biden his victory despite his not being successful in the earlier primaries. Many claim that his success with Black voters came from their belief that he was the candidate who was best equipped to defeat former president Donald Trump. In this context, Biden’s commitment to the community may not have been the factor at the forefront of the minds of many Black voters. However, I argue that, despite the context, Biden still employed numerous signals of his commitment to the racial group throughout his campaign, particularly in the general election. His consistent invocation of his connection to Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president who is also loved by many Black voters was a constant signal Biden used. His support from other prominent Black politicians such as South Carolina representative Jim Clyburn some three days before the South Carolina primary also went far to bolster his support. All of this is to say that while community commitment may not have been at the forefront of Black people’s minds, it still mattered. Biden, despite already having strong Black support, consistently referred to his social connections to the Black community and explicitly referenced his commitment to it. Community commitment may not always be the most salient factor in Black voters’ calculus, but it will always be a factor.

I have shown that Black voters’ strongest preference is for politicians who show commitment to the racial group through signals of sacrifice. While the evidence presented here about Black people’s preference is clear, Black voters also know that every politician is not going to be able to give them exactly what they want. Part of the political game Black voters are forced to play is choosing candidates who can get them as close to their optimal preference as possible. This reality is not confined to Black voters. Almost every voter must make concessions when choosing who they will support. The importance of this work is found in the foundation is lays for us to truly understand what it is that Black voters are looking for outside of similar physical attributes and partisanship. With this research, scholarship can delve deeper into the nuances and tradeoffs that Black voters undoubtedly must make when presented with options whose commitment does not come close to what this book shows is their most preferred kind of politician.

Broader Implications

Until this work, very little research have been able to offer and test a mechanism that explains Black voters’ candidate preferences. A politician’s skin color, gender identity, and partisanship have all served as the chief explanations for how certain candidates get supported by Black voters. It is not my claim that these physical factors are not meaningful elements in voters’ calculus, but rather that they serve as a first step in their decision to support a certain politician over another, rather than the only step. I argue throughout this book that, in the context of Black politics, Black politicians enjoy somewhat of a benefit of the doubt with regard to their perceived commitment relative to their White counterparts. However, the benefit of the doubt does not mean that their skin color was enough to render community commitment unnecessary. If that were the case, we would have observed that, regardless of the community commitment signal employed by Black politicians, their perceived commitment and affective evaluations would have been the same across the variety of signals. Instead, even across Black Democratic politicians, Black individuals make distinctions both in terms of perceived commitment and their evaluations. This consistent evidence affirms that the physical manifestations of one’s identity alone are not enough to determine whether a Black politician gets Black voter support.

Implications for Black Politics

One of the main takeaways from this work is that Black voters are highly strategic in their candidate selection. Scholars generally note that race is a basic heuristic from which people tend to derive a certain meaning. However, most of that premise relies on the presumption that skin color is the sole factor of one’s racial identity. In this book, I show that skin color, while playing some part, is not the only way that Black people arrive at their political choices. Black voters’ understanding of Audre Lorde’s assertion that “all skinfolk ain’t kinfolk,” explains their intentional reliance on the social dynamics of Blackness as it requires more nuance than existing scholarship suggests. This book offers a means to understand how Black people’s social expectations of each other bleed into what they want to see from their potential representatives as well as what information they glean from the appeals used to attract their support.

Despite the temporal distance from the Civil Rights Movement, and the transition into mainstream politics, Black voters still want representatives whose actions resemble those of Civil Rights Movement activists. This is not just because those actions led to meaningful changes in the way that Black voters lived and moved, but also because the sacrifices provide strong evidence of commitment to the Black community and mirror the myriad sacrifices Black people have made throughout history to move closer to equal treatment. Furthermore, the fight of those activists is not over, the guard is simply changing. The desire for racial equity and inclusion in the wake of an increase in voter suppression, high amounts of violence leveraged against Black bodies by law enforcement, and other injustices remain in this contemporary moment. Thus, there is no reason to believe that the usage of sacrifice as a means by which to address these concerns will ebb, nor should the desire for politicians who are willing and committed to engaging in this behavior for the sake of the Black community.

In recent times, we have seen an increase in the act of protest with the Movement for Black Lives which has drawn direct comparison to the Civil Rights Movement. Many politicians recently elected to Congress who were active during the peak moments of these protests leveraged their activism to show their commitment to the group were successful in their electoral bids, some overturning other, well-established Democrats. The reality that Black voters still prefer those with activism in their personal and political narratives is a salient contribution to understanding Black political behavior because it shows that vestiges of this bygone era of Black politics remain integral to the way that Black individuals understand effective representation. I explain why past work finds that Black people prefer politicians with roots in the Civil Rights Movement and why, even with the changes in the sociopolitical situation of many Black individuals, it persists today.

Generally speaking, within the literature on the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation, some scholars argue that the value of descriptive representation is undermined because it does not always manifest in substantive representation for Black voters. Some scholars have gone so far as to say that descriptive representation is unnecessary as outgroup representatives can pass laws that provide the same level of racially beneficial legislation as those who share that identity with their constituents (Swain Reference Swain1993; Platt 2013). Others have found that Black politicians are especially adept at introducing legislation that is meant to help the Black community (Deitrich and Hayes Reference Dietrich and Hayes2023) but offer very little in the way of explaining whether this is an intrinsic aspect of their identity or the byproduct of Black voters’ selection of certain representatives.

I show the relationship between Black voters’ perception of a politician’s community commitment and their ability to represent the group’s desire through policy does exist. This suggests that the information gleaned from community commitment signals goes beyond assessments of cost to the substantive implications of one’s ability to represent the racial group. Black politicians being more likely than their White counterparts to put forth legislation that assists the Black community is one part of the story. I offer another part – Black voters choose these politicians because they show a prioritization to the group’s interests legislatively as well. It is not happenstance or coincidence that Black politicians elected from majority Black districts promote Black policies, it is a byproduct of the strategic nature of Black voter decision-making.

Implications for Political Representation

More broadly, this book offers a roadmap for understanding how marginalized voting populations, beyond Black voters, choose the candidates whom they want to support. How one’s identity is used and applied, if at all, in politics is difficult to fully understand, particularly when that identity has multiple components that are unseen and thus undiscussed. However, my framework offers a step forward by inviting scholars to focus on the social expectations and historical narratives of these marginalized groups to establish what is important to members of that identity group and glean what effective signals might be. This research here not only explains why certain appeals are effective, but what the underlying information is perceived by voters. Oftentimes, we, as scholars, presume what information voters use without little evidence, but the theory and empirical support established in this text provide a clear path to unpack the candidate selection decision-making processes marginalized voters undergo.

Finally, this work complicates the role of identity in candidate selection focusing more on the social manifestations of that identity than the physical appearance. The theoretical claims of this work consider what it means for people of a particular identity group to assess and evaluate potential representatives using their socially grounded understandings of their identity as the barometer. This is an important and meaningful contribution because, oftentimes, in the debate about identity politics, identity is seen as a weakness and a tool of the politically unsophisticated. In reality, social identities are filled with important information that goes beyond just “you look like me” or “you identify the same way as me.” Identity, if explored enough, tells a deeper and more nuanced story, which many voters understand and utilize when making political decisions.

Are All Co-Racial Representatives Descriptive Representatives?

The terms descriptive representation, co-racial representation, and same-race representation are often used interchangeably; however, I argue that there are meaningful differences between these titles. Mansbridge (Reference Mansbridge1999) argues that descriptive representatives are ones who, in addition to sharing outward manifestations with their constituents, also have shared experiences and higher levels of trust. Dovi (Reference Dovi2002) argues something similar in her claims that descriptive representatives have to be seen by voters as “one of us,” based on an intragroup criterion. Throughout this book, I have shown, through historical narratives as well as multiple empirical interventions, that Black voters use their own experiences of group prioritization through sacrifice to assess the behaviors of representatives. When we consider what it means to “share lived experiences” or be “one of us,” Black individuals draw on instances where they, or those they know, have placed the group’s interests above their own, and look for politicians who do the same. They understand, however, that every Black politician cannot lay claim to that experience even when they look like them.

In the most recent Georgia senatorial race between Democratic incumbent, Senator Reverend Dr. Raphael Warnock and his Republican opponent, Herschel Walker, the distinction between descriptive and co-racial representatives is made the clearest. Herschel Walker is, by all accounts, a co-racial representative insofar that he is an individual who shares the phenotypic similarities with many Black individuals. However, Walker’s appeals in no way reflect an understanding of the experiences many Black people have, or an adherence to the expectations of sacrifices made for the racial group. Senator Warnock’s appeals, on the other hand, do illustrate his connection to the racial group through socialization and sacrifice. Warnock, based on conventional understandings of descriptive representation, coupled with the arguments put forth in this text, would be what I would call a descriptive representative, someone who represents Black voters by not only sharing a physical similarity but displaying an understanding of their social expectations of the racial group.

As we move forward in our exploration of identity’s role in political representation, this book invites us to think in the same strategic and deep way as Black voters. Instead of relying solely on skin color to understand how race operates in the representative/constituent paradigm, we can investigate the social aspects that live underneath the physical. Instead of using single moments, no matter how important, to define the behavior of a group, we can investigate that group’s history and allow that to inform our inquiries and our answers. Instead of assuming that sharing one’s identity with a politician means an automatic preference for them, we can recognize that identity’s role in politics is complex, and oversimplified explanations of identity-based behavior will always fall short of satisfactorily explaining the part it plays in politics.