Voter Evaluations of Biracial-Identified Political Candidates

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Overall, I appreciated this manuscript and learned a lot. In order to be publishable, the paper must more seriously engage with political science research and the scholarship in political science on mixed candidates. Right now, the paper reads like it's a social psych paper that is just nodding to political science, but the theory section needs to actually build on and extend what has been written. Given the theme of this edited issue, I want to push the author(s) to blend Political Science research with Critical Mixed Race Studies research.

My comments will focus more on the theoretical framing and engagement with critical approaches to mixed race.

1) The author(s) should situate this paper more strongly within the descriptive representation literature. Walk us through Mansbridge 1999 and what's been done in recent years, with special attention to more recent work like Adida et al. 2015; Burge et al. 2020; Brown and Lemi 2021, etc.  The main piece of knowledge you're contributing is what mixed people think about mixed candidates, but you need to situate that alongside more recent work in representation.

2) I think the author(s) should take a step back and theorize why mixed people would react to mixed candidates at all. What is the relationship between a mixed race person and a mixed race candidate? There is no clear mixed race political interest to rally around. There is no demonstrated history of systematic marginalization by the space for mixed race people per se, only subjugation of specific combinations of backgrounds.

2) Here is where I think it's useful to think through the linked fate/group consciousness literature. Do you have measures of group consciousness or anything that could get at that? You could test whether mixed people who feel a sense of linked fate/consciousness with other mixed people either based on their specific combination or mixed people broadly prefer mixed representatives.

3) For theorizing on non-mixed people's responses to mixed candidates, you may want to go through Lemi 2020 again to think through why non-mixed people react to different combinations of mixed candidates

4) I think the paper should more strongly engage with CMRS research, especially work by Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl and Celeste Curington on using intersectionality to understand the larger structural processes of mixed race. Part of why we see the "rise" of mixed politicians is because of societal fetishization of mixed race people—they are palatable. 

6) I want to hear more theorizing about the significance of what it means to be an Asian-white candidate vs. a Black-white candidate and how/why each group would react differently to each kind of candidate based on how they identify. This is why I think it's important to engage with Strmic-Pawl and Curington, because what it means to be Asian-white and Black-white, and how voters see those politicians, is very different. This is the place to combine the insights of the descriptive representation literature with CMRS --we know that different communities have different political behavior for historical reasons, how can we put that in conversation with how different communities react to different mixed candidates? 

7) I want to caution against using the language of "Black-white binary." Ethnoracial ordering is all interconnected--thinking of Masuoka and Junn 2013/Kim 1999. Here's another way you can connect Political Science to CMRS by thinking more deeply about what it means to be Black-white and Asian-white. You're not actually incorporating Asian-white candidates to "go beyond" a binary, you're incorporating them to get a broader picture of how voters react to mixed candidates and to detect how Asian-white candidates are racialized within the hierarchy. See Bonilla-Silva on the tri-racial hierarchy

8) I think you need to explicitly theorize what it means to have mixed heritage and identify with two categories. Those two things are different and don't always overlap, but in order to connect this to descriptive representation, you need to draw out what's doing the work. Is it that people who have mixed heritage are socialized a particular way and that leads them to react a certain way to mixed candidates? Is it that people who self-identify with two categories have a baseline sense of consciousness as "mixed"?  A lot of this is getting buried in the paper, but tell us up front right away what we're going to learn. 

9) My personal preference would be to decide if this is a paper about how non-mixed people evaluate mixed candidates or how mixed people evaluate mixed candidates. Right now, there's a lot going on in the analysis and I do think you need some space to theorize. I defer to the author(s)/editor(s) on this. But if you can theorize more about mixed people and connect that to descriptive representation, in my opinion, that's a clearer new contribution, especially with the new Davenport et al. papers in AJPS and JOP. But, I want to reinforce the need to engage with CMRS as you theorize more about mixed people's preferences for "descriptive" representatives. 

10) I'm interested in hearing what the author(s) think about how this plays into campaign strategy. I think the discussion section, when placed in conversation with Lemi 2020/2018, really shows how thoughtful mixed candidates must be when deciding how to present their biographies. This study seems to suggest that not highlighting that one identifies as mixed could cost some votes from mixed people, while Lemi suggests classification with two categories could cost votes from non-mixed people. Seems very much like a common mixed person experience. 

Other things:

Clarify how multiracial is operationalized in the graph, this is done so in a footnote but add it to the labels. Does "multiracial" refer to checking two boxes, having interracial parentage, or explicitly identifying as multiracial? The / and - system is kind of confusing. 

Streamline all the arguments/hypotheses/results. Tell me, clearly, what you are doing in this paper and what I am supposed to learn and talk about my friends with later. Enumerate the hypotheses so I can scroll past and see what is going on. Move the tables to the appendix and make the plots more intuitive with clearer labels. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper uses an experimental survey design to test the potential impacts of audiences on likelihood of voting for a multiracial candidate. The paper makes a clear contribution to the literature on political behavior and racial identity. Its findings are presented in clear and concise ways. Its engagement with relevant literature is appropriate and well done. In particular, how the paper demonstrates the unique preferences and experiences of multiracial individuals and how it clearly articulate the implications for future research activities and agendas is particularly strong.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Update the abstract to reflect the full experimental design (Asian-white and Black-white candidates)

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 1,

We appreciate your recommendation to revise the abstract so that it better reflects the entire experimental deign and have added language to amend.

Thank you again for your time and thoughtful comments—our manuscript is much improved because of your guidance.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx