Gene Demby has an informative piece using Kanye West’s right-turn as a starting point to explore ideology among Black Americans. He explains, with the help of some scholars, why black conservatives, who comprise a substantial segment of the African-American population, don’t tend to be Republicans. Part of the explanation is linked fate, defined in the article as “the belief among black folks that their individual prospects are tied to a collective well-being.” The concept, championed by political scientist Michael Dawson has been instrumental in the study of race and politics, especially electoral behavior and why groups vote as blocs, even when there are significant ideological cleavages.
Ismail White of George Washington University argues that linked fate is not the only mechanism explaining the homogeneity of the African American vote. There is also a peer pressure factor enforcing these voting patterns. From the article:
What White and and three other researchers found in a recent study is that social pressure from other black people is how this Democratic norm gets policed. They found that the expectations around this norm were so powerful that simply having a black questioner ask a black respondent about their voting preferences made that respondent more likely to say they were voting for a Democratic candidate.
Chryl Laird, one of the study’s authors, said this is how everyone votes. We like to think of our voting choices as purely rational, but we take cues from the people around us, especially when we don’t know much about a candidate or an issue. Laird said social influence and pressure partly explain why most white evangelical voters in Alabama supported Senate candidate Roy Moore last fall, even after he was accused of sexual misconduct involving minors.
My dissertation on Latinx politics explores why Latinx people overwhelmingly support one party even when there’s ideological diversity in the group. My conceptualization of ideology is entirely different since I avoid traditional”liberal-conservative” labels. Instead, I opt for a definition rooted in linked fate and identity that I call the “ethnic ideological heuristic.” My findings suggest that even among Latinx people who are traditionally conservative (in the way we understand conservatism in contemporary politics), the explicit racism of the GOP has been a deterrent. Latinx people don’t wholly trust the Democrats anyway and tend to have lower levels of partisan attachment as a result.
In summary, among African Americans and Latinxs, even when people have conservative ideas, these do not necessarily translate to support for the GOP for myriad reasons. But the principal one is that the white identity politics at the core of GOP conservatism is toxic even to people of color who agree with similar ideas.
