Steadfast Democrats is an important book that explores the origins, maintenance, and consequences of African Americans’ tight-knit allegiance to the Democratic Party. The book is incredibly timely. American partisanship is shaped increasingly by loyalties grounded in race, ethnicity, religion, and gender, which can be perplexing to political observers who expect a rational electorate that chooses candidates on the basis of ideology, policy positions, and other reasoned considerations (Ashley Jardina, White Identity Politics, 2019; Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, 2018). White and Laird have this skeptical audience in mind as they shed needed light on the nature of Black partisanship, providing answers to a series of pressing and politically pertinent questions: Is Black loyalty to the Democratic Party misplaced? Self-defeating? Irreversible? The answers to these questions emerge from analysis of survey data and a series of creative and insightful experiments. The authors’ empirical findings have resonance well beyond the study of Black political behavior, illuminating the process by which political identities are maintained very generally. The mix of a specific focus on Black politics and general insight into the maintenance of group-based partisan ties renders this book an instant classic.
One of the most important insights to emerge from Steadfast Democrats is that African Americans are held strongly in place politically by racial norms that fuse Black and Democratic identities. In a nutshell, White and Laird argue that it is difficult for Blacks to defect from the Democratic Party because black institutions such as the church and institutions of higher education impose social sanctions on anyone who deviates politically. By emphasizing the importance of social reputation, White and Laird build on Dennis Chong’s (Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement, 1991) influential study of the civil rights movement. In chapter 4, the authors show that Black survey respondents are more likely to say they are Democrats when interviewed by a Black than a white interviewer. They also reveal the misalignment of ideology and partisanship among conservative Blacks. The discrepancy between ideology and partisanship is reduced, however, when conservative respondents are interviewed by a white interviewer, providing clear evidence that Black conservatives misreport their partisanship to Black interviewers to conform to racial norms.
White and Laird’s strongest evidence for the role of racial norms in maintaining Black Democratic identity emerges from a series of clever experiments discussed in chapters 5 and 6 (also published in Ismail White, Chryl Laird, and Troy Allen, “Selling Out? The Politics of Navigating Conflicts between Racial Group Interest and Self-Interest,” 108 [4], American Political Science Review, 2014) in which they ask Black respondents to allocate funds to either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney in the leadup to the 2012 presidential election. They vary the conditions under which this allocation is made, contrasting situations in which group norms, self-interest, or both are heightened. The experimental setup allows White and Laird to demonstrate that norm enforcement, heightened in their studies either by public sharing of a participant’s position or the presence of a Black experimental confederate, increases the monetary allocation to Obama. In contrast, a monetary inducement to support Romney in the absence of norm enforcement decreases the allocation to Obama. Their results are compelling, eye-opening, and difficult to reconcile with alternative explanations. They also hold real-world implications for the stability of Black political solidarity and the conditions under which it could erode.
White and Laird’s findings have obvious practical implications for American partisan politics. They also make a real theoretical contribution to research on group politics by underscoring the maintenance of social reputation as a motive for group cooperation and solidarity. This is not the only factor that has been proposed to explain political group solidarity; indeed, it has not received very much attention at all in past research. The authors contrast social reputation with the competing and far more popular explanation that shared group interests shape Black political solidarity. From this competing realistic interest vantage point, Black support for the Democratic Party and its candidates is driven by the protection of shared racial interests, not a defense of one’s “Black” reputation. The authors directly contrast these two explanations in their experimental studies. To rule out the group interest explanation, they examine whether individuals who feel linked fate with other Blacks defect and give money to Mitt Romney in the absence of anticipated social sanctions. From a group interest perspective, those who hold a strong sense of linked fate with other Blacks should give money to Obama, regardless of the presence or absence of social surveillance. This is not what happens, however. Instead, social sanctions prevail, leading those high in linked fate (and others) to succumb to self-interest in the absence of social scrutiny. Evidence from the study that Blacks who are less personally subject to racial norms are also more likely to defect from the Democratic Party further strengthens White and Laird’s conclusion that norms, but not interests, shape Black partisan loyalties.
White and Laird’s challenge to the group interest model and linked fate as one of its key variables (see also White, “When Race Matters and When It Doesn’t: Racial Group Differences in Response to Racial Cues,” American Political Science Review, 2007) is an important component of the book that helps advance and fine-tune the study of racial and ethnic politics. Linked fate is commonly measured and frequently relied on to explain partisan solidarity among members of diverse racial and ethnic groups. But there is only weak evidence that linked fate drives partisanship, as noted by the authors in chapter 2, raising questions about what drives group solidarity more generally. White and Laird advance the study of race, ethnic, and other forms of group politics by providing a new framework from which to examine the maintenance of political group solidarity.
I have a minor concern about the external validity of experiments involving the primacy of self-interest over group concerns, which provides some of the strongest evidence for White and Laird’s model. Past research in political psychology has made clear that self-interest is a surprisingly uncommon basis for citizen political decision making (David O. Sears and Carolyn L. Funk, “The Role of Self-Interest in Social and Political Attitudes,” 24, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 1991). Typically, the stakes are too small, unknown, or uncertain for self-interest to play much of a role in shaping political decisions. This raises questions about the existence of conditions within an election that would lead to the type of Black partisan defection documented in the book. Perhaps under extreme or improbable circumstances Blacks would defect from the Democratic Party, but under normal conditions partisan defection is unlikely. Of course, things can change over time, and White and Laird’s research makes crystal clear that any crack in racial partisan norms would quickly erode Black Democratic partisanship. But that raises a further question about what weakens this link, bringing us back to the puzzling question of the origins of partisan norms as opposed to their maintenance.
The partisan loyalties and cohesiveness of Black, Latino, and Asian voters will profoundly influence the shape of American politics in the coming years, as has been made abundantly clear in recent national elections. Will the Democratic alliance hold firm? Can the Republican Party survive in its current form, even as its white base of support ages and declines in number? White and Laird provide an opening salvo in what I expect to be a rich and lengthy scholarly exchange. They answer some pressing central questions concerning the maintenance of party ties but leave others unanswered, such as those concerning the origins of racial norms and their longevity. Steadfast Democrats will have a generative effect on research in the area of race and ethnic politics and the study of partisan politics more generally, one that I plan to follow closely.
