“Black Voters Aren’t Turning Out For The Post-Obama Democratic Party.” It’s a familiar headline in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. Indeed, post-election analysis of voter data shows black turnout in presidential elections declined 4.7 percent between 2012 and 2016 (overall turnout showed a small decline from 61.8 percent in 2012 to 61.4 percent in 2016).
How do we explain it — and can it be changed? My ongoing research with Ismail White on political norms among black Americans says we ought to have expected the decline, but that the Democratic Party can do much more to cut it back by recognizing how social dynamics shape African-American politics.
Some have attributed the decline in black turnout to voter suppression tactics made possible by the Shelby v. Holder (2013) decision that rescinded key protections from the Voting Rights Act. But black turnout saw similar declines in states where no new voter laws were implemented after the Shelby decision. Others have simplistically pointed to the absence of the first black president on the ballot — as if that fact offers an explanation. Our work on the social dynamics of politics within the black community provides the missing explanation.
In our recent publication in the American Political Science Review, we argue that the continued social isolation of blacks in American society has created spaces and incentives for the emergence of black political norms. Democratic partisanship has become significantly tied to black identity in the United States. The historical and continued racial segregation of black communities has produced spaces in which in-group members can leverage social sanctions against other group members to ensure compliance with group partisan norms.
As a result, social sanctions are the main explanation for why black people behave in this collective manner. In other words, if a politician wants greater support from blacks, her best bet is getting the social processes within the community working in her favor.
To see the power of these norms and social sanctions, we conducted a number of experiments that randomly assigned black participants to incentives to defect from a well-known norm of black politics: supporting Barack Obama. In one of the studies, we provided small amounts of cash that participants were told they could keep or donate to the Obama campaign. In another study, depicted in the graph below, we provided $100 to allocate across the Obama and Romney campaigns, but told respondents that contributions made to Romney would result in a 10 percent kickback to them personally. (Note: No campaign contributions were actually made, and participants were debriefed that the campaign donations were not real after the study).
What we learned: The norm alone wasn’t enough for many. Faced with a chance to do for themselves at (small) cost to the group, plenty did so. Sixty-four percent of the participants that donated more to Romney in the kickback scenario were Democrats.
But we also randomly assigned a number of mechanisms of social monitoring and sanctioning — from the simple observance of the potential defection by another black person to the threat of publication of the transgression in a community newspaper. The social nature of black political behavior shone through: We consistently found that social sanctions constrained subjects when faced with a conflict between a clear self-interest and the group interest. Participants in all of our social sanctioning conditions were much more adherent to the group interest, even though it clearly cost them personally.
In a subsequent working paper, we expand on candidate support based on group norm and examine the reported partisanship by blacks in the face of social pressure from co-racial group members. Leveraging the race of the interviewers in the American National Election Study, we find that in face-to-face interviews, black respondents express significantly greater identification with the Democratic Party when interviewed by a black individual compared to being interviewed by a white individual or taken online (absent an interviewer).
Face-to-face interviews with black interviewers serve as a conservative test of the social dynamic in the black community, but provide a clear indication that blacks are aware of the group expectations when it comes to partisanship and are likely to adhere to the trend of black affiliation with the Democratic Party.
So how do we use this insight to understand the 2016 drop-off in black voter turnout? Consider that even though support for President Obama as the first black president was unquestionably understood as in the black collective interest, our work shows that behaviorally, supporting him was not a given. Behavior — including turnout — requires payment of at least a small personal cost, and social incentives are key to ensuring that cost is paid. That black turnout levels returned in 2016 to levels from the 2004 election suggests that what fell off was the black community’s incentives to deliver its full voting potential.
That the (re)election of the first black president provided the clearest and most significant incentive to deliver black votes, however, does not mean that black turnout can never rise again. It only means that other Democratic politicians have to learn how to make their own candidacies speak as clearly to the collective interests of blacks as Obama’s did.
Chryl Laird is an assistant professor of government and legal studies at Bowdoin College. She studies American politics with specialization in race and ethnic politics and political psychology. Her published work can be found in the American Political Science Review and Politics, Groups, and Identities.