Two steps forward, one step back? Bias in the 2008 presidential election

The candidates running during the 2008 presidential campaign were the most diverse in America’s history. Prior to this historic election, female and minority candidates had little success in pursuing the presidency. Barack Obama’s victory signals a decline in those barriers. Yet some groups, especially religious ones, continue to face barriers, including Atheists, Mormons and Muslims. The paper takes a close look at bias in presidential voting. This examination will provide an opportunity to consider new hypotheses about why barriers remain, shedding light on the nature and extent of bias within the American public. We consider social desirability, ideology, social contact, and group threat explanations. To test our ideas, we rely on list experiments using national representative samples in 2007 and in 2008. These data provide a unique opportunity to advance our understanding of the 2008 election, in particular, and the role of bias, in general. The results also offer some insight into future presidential elections.

► We examine the bias against various “minority” candidates who might run for the U.S. presidency.
► The backdrop for the paper is the obvious historic nature of Obama’s election and the success of other candidates such as Hillary Clinton.
► But this success may be deceiving and so we employ list experiments to estimate bias that avoids the problem of social desirability. Our data come from national samples using internet experiments in 2007 and 2008 that we designed for this study.
► Our findings our clear. There is not much explicit bias against African-American or female candidates. But there is substantial bias against Mormons, Evangelicals, Atheists, and Muslim candidates.
► The amount of bias, we posit, is a function of the level of social contact with members of a given group as well as whether religious threat is politically salient. Our data support our hypotheses.