Which Are The Ties That Bind? Individual Preferences for Intersectional and Substantive Representation

While vast literatures explored the role of political representation in terms of isolated identities such as gender or race, many questions remain about how these identities interact in the context of competing preferences for dyadic, collective, and issue-based representation. In this project, we develop an experimental framework to explore why certain types of representation are more important for different social groups and how converging social identities may interact in mobilizing voters. We test our theory based on a pre-registered survey experiment conducted as part of the 2022 Cooperative Election Study. Shortly before the U.S. midterm elections of that year, our respondents answered a short survey about salient political issues and participated in a visual conjoint experiment where they are matched with various (fictional) lawmakers from different states. Respondents were asked to evaluate how well they would feel represented in each legislature based on the lawmaker's photo, their individual policy overlap, as well as the state legislatures' composition with respect to party, race, and gender. Each respondent participated in 5 rounds with pairwise comparisons of lawmaker / legislature profiles. As part of the conjoint experiment, we manipulate whether policy overlap with each lawmaker focuses on issues specifically related to gender, race, or general policies. Based on this conjoint experiment, we are able to identify diverging preferences for different types of (intersectional) descriptive and substantive representation among historically underrepresented groups. We further contextualize these findings with data from a post-election wave after the 2022 midterms where respondents are asked to evaluate how represented they feel by their own state legislature, the US House, and the US Senate. In addition to contrasting individual preferences for different types of representation, our approach allows us to examine how differently positioned groups perceive politicians that share (or do not share) various components of their identity, and how it motivates subsequent political participation. In sum, our results help us better understand the mechanisms connecting representation and engagement across various salient social identities.