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.

厘清政治候选人的当选机制，乃是民主政治与政治学研究的核心议题。尽管学界普遍认为，政党隶属是选民考量候选人时最为重要的特征之一，但关于候选人性别与种族的相关研究结论却莫衷一是。本文提出，选民具备词典式偏好（lexicographic preferences）：即选民会对自身的偏好进行排序，并首要关注候选人的政党隶属关系。诸如性别与种族这类二阶偏好，仅在一阶偏好出现平局时才会发挥主要作用——也就是当选民在同党派候选人之间做出选择，或缺乏政党相关信息时的情形。本文阐释了如何利用联合分析实验（conjoint experiments）检验词典式偏好，并借助美国代表性样本数据与预注册重复实验（pre-registered replication），证实了在美国语境下性别与种族属于二阶偏好。据此，词典式偏好可作为一种理论视角，解释候选人研究相关文献中关于性别与种族的部分莫衷一是的研究结论。