Publication of a book in time to speak to and explain a big part of unfolding political moments is a dream for many political scientists. And the publication of Steadfast Democrats could not have come at a better time for Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird. Whether by kismet or strategy, their deeply insightful and broadly applicable book about intraracial social costs—tangible and intangible—influencing Black Americans as voters arrived in time to better explain the inevitable: the most centrist Democratic candidate in the 2020 presidential primaries would garner a majority of votes cast by the Black electorate, and a supermajority of Black votes would go to the Democratic candidate in the 2020 presidential general election.
Steadfast Democrats examines “black Democratic unity.” Such unity, generally, is among the most predictable political phenomena in the United States. To be clear, this book is not a descriptive tome about the fact that black voters overwhelmingly favor Democratic Party candidates over Republic Party, third-party, and independent candidates. Rather, Steadfast Democrats rightly and rigorously explores a mechanism that may account for much of why a supermajority of Black Americans—inclusive of American descendants of enslaved Africans, Black immigrants and their descendants, and biracial Americans with Black lineage—consistently as a group back the Democratic Party in national, state, and, where city charters permit partisan ballots, local elections.
Certainly, good books about why Black voters solidly remain Democrats and how Black voters became the base of the Democratic Party exist. Yet, despite decades of research on Black partisan electoral behavior, there is a lack of research, as White and Laird explain, “for understanding how black Americans as a group have succeeded in solving a basic sociopolitical dilemma: how to maintain group unity in political choices seen by most as helping the group in the face of individual incentives to behave otherwise” (p. 3). The masterful effort of White and Laird to fill that lacuna—aided by a provocative thesis, breadth of public opinion data, and a small set of novel social psychology experiments—sets Steadfast Democrats apart from other books on “black Democratic unity.”
The thesis of White and Laird is that intragroup social pressure influences the collective political behavior of Black Americans as voters. Basically, if Blacks as individuals regard how Blacks as social collectives perceive them, most Blacks as individuals should feel obligated or coerced to uphold the norms of Black civil society and therefore seek to meet its expectations of group solidarity. White and Laird use that reasoning to explain why most Black voters as individuals, especially those Black voters whose circumstances, dispositions, and interests might make them more conservative and open to Republican appeals, continue to collectively cast their ballots for Democratic candidates.
Theorizing the existence of what they term “racialized social constraint,” which need not only apply to Black voters or voting and can apply to any group able to socially pressure its members (e.g., Evangelicals or neo-Nazis), White and Laird posit that much—but not all—collective Black voting behavior results from social relationships and civil society in Black communities shaping, regulating, and limiting individual Black voting behavior, thereby enforcing the dominant norm of “black Democratic unity.” Seeing or perceiving Black votes against Democratic candidates as Black votes against the interests of Black civil society and its members—or partisan defections, the argument goes—produces negative social consequences for Black voters as members of Black civil society. Therefore, Black civil society uses “social sanctioning” of individual-level partisan defections—rhetorical and real—to retain group solidarity, keeping the Black electorate unified during early voting and on Election Day.
Thankfully, White and Laird “are not suggesting that black Americans are mindlessly following the dictates of the group” (or the Democratic Party, as many Republicans claim when running against Democrats; p. 17). Blacks as individuals retain and exercise political agency within Black civil society, always. Partisan defectors and would-be-defectors, nonetheless, may calculate and incur personal costs for choices that undermine Black solidarity at the polls. White and Laird address all of this in six chapters of high-quality theory, analysis, and reflection and jam-packed with data, nestled between an engaging introduction and a forward-thinking conclusion.
From almost the first page, Steadfast Democrats draws from a big store of public opinion data, culled from decades of surveys, including the General Social Survey, the American National Election Studies, the National Black Elections Studies, the Pew Multiracial Survey, the Detroit Area Study, and the Kinder Houston Area Survey. Many readers may wish, however, that the book included a table or appendix that identified all of these sources in one place.
Yet, the sheer volume of public opinion evidence that White and Laird marshal is not overkill. Every piece of survey data they employ, coupled with interesting findings from experiments with undergraduates, buttresses the development, testing, and defense of their proposition that “racialized social constraint” explains much of the endurance of “black Democratic unity.” Furthermore, Steadfast Democrats recognizes its empirical limits and does not exaggerate its findings.
Like good books should, Steadfast Democrats leaves readers asking an assortment of questions meriting future research. For example, if there are costs to partisan defections, might some, perhaps many, Black voters avoid the polls, thereby avoiding the social consequences of acting on individual preferences? If many avoid the social consequences of partisan defection by becoming electorally inactive, how much may “racialized social constraint” reduce voting and other electoral behavior, such as campaign donations and volunteerism, in Black communities? If silence is a tactic for defectors and ballots cast retain the secrets of individual voters, how can Black civil society determine which of its members defect, which is a necessary condition for fairly distributing the costs of defection?
Additionally, what about the steadfastness of Black political behavior in other countries where Black citizens (or other nonwhite citizens) are a minority of the voting-age population but a majority of them consistently support a particular party over time? Countries and parties that come to mind include the United Kingdom and the Labour Party and Canada and the Liberal Party. To what degree, if at all, does the thesis of “racialized social control” in Black civil society exist in those places?
Also, as novel and interesting as experiments with young Black adults on or near campuses of predominantly white and historically Black institutions of higher education can be, what are the opportunities and challenges to experimenting in Black churches, beauty salons and barbershops, union halls, and meeting spaces of national Black associations, which arguably provide more representative social contexts for observing the dynamics of “racialized social constraint” in Black America?
Furthermore, although White and Laird justly focus on Black-on-Black social pressure to retain “Black Democratic unity,” how much of Black electoral solidarity still expresses Black vigilance and pushback against white political aversion to Black policy preferences and interests? It was a question before the rise of “Trumpism” in white civil society; it may be a more pivotal question if “Trumpism” endures long after Trump.
In sum, this is an excellent political behavior book, period. It richly merits all attention and awards, encomiums and course adoptions it receives, now and evermore.
