Replication Data for: Lexicographic Preferences in Candidate Choice. How Party Affiliation Dominates Gender and Race.

Understanding which political candidates are elected for office is fundamental to democracy and political science. Whereas there is much agreement that party affiliation is one of the most important candidate characteristics to voters, evidence regarding gender and race of the candidate is mixed. We suggest that voters have lexicographic preferences, meaning that they rank their preferences and focus primarily on party affiliation of the candidates. Second-order preferences such as gender and race are mostly important when there is a tie on first-order preferences, i.e., when voters choose between two same-party candidates or have no party information. We show how conjoint experiments can be used to test for lexicographic preferences, and use we use data from a US-representative sample and a pre-registered replication to confirm that in the US, gender and race are second-order preferences. Lexicographic preferences thereby provide a theoretical lens that explains some of the mixed results of gender and race in the candidate literature.