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Group Politics Redux: Race and Gender in the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2009

Leonie Huddy  and
Tony E. Carey Jr.
Leonie Huddy
Affiliation:
Stony Brook University
Tony E. Carey Jr.
Affiliation:
Stony Brook University
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Extract

The earliest political behavior researchers documented the powerful effects of group attachments and other socioeconomic factors on vote choice and partisan identification in the 1940s and 1950s (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954; Campbell et al. 1960). Yet, research interest in the group-based origins of political behavior has waxed and waned in the intervening decades (Huddy 2003). The existence of both an African-American and female frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 provides an opportunity to consider the contemporary electoral consequences of in-group loyalties and out-group antipathies. We take advantage of select survey and poll data collected during the 2008 Democratic primaries to evaluate the power of gender and race as both positive and negative influences on voter calculus in an election in which the two major candidates were differentiated less by their issue positions and beliefs than by their skin color and gender.

Type
Critical Perspectives on Gender and Politics
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 81 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2009

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