Vote Overreporting While Black: Identifying the Mechanism Behind Black Survey Respondents’ Vote Overreporting

It is now a well-documented fact of survey research that Black survey respondents overreport turning out to vote at higher rates than many of their peers of other racial and ethnic backgrounds. We bring renewed attention to this phenomenon by investigating how the ways in which the race of the interviewer might influence a Back respondent’s propensity to overreport turning out to vote. In this paper, we test two competing mechanisms for African American overreporting and race of interviewer effects: (1) racial group linked fate, and (2) conformity with norms of Black political behavior. We find support that social pressure to conform to group norms of political behavior is behind Black respondent’s overreporting in the presence of a same-race interviewer. These results have significant implications for how we view, analyze, and consider results from such studies.

A Discussion of Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird’s Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior

Charge: As Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird note, collectively more than 80% of African Americans self-identify as Democrats according to surveys, and no Republican presidential candidate has won more than 13% of the Black vote since 1968. This is true despite the fact that at the individual level many African Americans are increasingly politically moderate and even conservative. Against this backdrop, what explains the enduring nature of African American support for the Democratic Party? In Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior, White and Laird answer this question by developing the concept of “racialized social constraint,” a unifying behavioral norm meant to empower African Americans as a group and developed through a shared history of struggle against oppression and for freedom and equality. White and Laird consider the historical development of this norm, how it is enforced, and its efficacy both in creating party loyalty and as a path to Black political power in the United States. On the cusp of perhaps the most consequential presidential election in American history, one for which African American turnout was crucial, we asked a range of leading political scientists to assess the relative strengths, weaknesses, and ramifications of this argument.