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Race and Responsiveness: An Experiment with South African Politicians*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2016

Gwyneth H. McClendon
Gwyneth H. McClendon*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Government and Social Studies, Harvard University, 1737 Cambridge Street, K207, Cambridge, MA 02138, e-mail: gmcclendon@gov.harvard.edu.
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Abstract

Do politicians engage in ethnic and racial favoritism when conducting constituency service? This article presents results from a replication field experiment with local South African politicians that tested for racial bias in responsiveness to requests about public goods provision. The experiment represents an adaptation of similar experiments conducted in the United States, extending the design to a different institutional environment, albeit one with a similar racially-charged history. Although one might suppose that politicians in South Africa would seek to avoid racial bias given the recent transition to full democracy, I find that South African politicians—both black and white—are more responsive to same-race constituents than to other-race constituents. Same-race bias is evident in both the dominant and the main opposition political parties. Moreover, politicians are not particularly responsive to anyone. Implications for the further study of democratic responsiveness are discussed.

Keywords

Field experimentdiscriminationethicsraceethnicitypolitical representationSouth Africa
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , Spring 2016 , pp. 60 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2016 

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Footnotes

*

The experiment was approved by the Princeton University Institutional Review Board. Thank you also to Justine Burns, Nicoli Nattrass, and Jeremy Seekings at the University of Cape Town for their reviews of the ethics of the experimental design. I would like to thank the Editors of JEPS, an Associate Editor, anonymous reviewers, Claire Adida, Graeme Blair, Chris Blattman, David Broockman, Elizabeth Carlson, Kanchan Chandra, Kim Yi Dionne, Thad Dunning, Karen Ferree, Clark Gibson, Shelby Grossman, Jeremy Horowitz, Kimuli Kasara, Evan Lieberman, Nachi Majoe, Dan Posner, Alexandra Scacco, Prerna Singh, Jeremy Weinstein and Brigitte Zimmerman as well as other participants in meetings at Dartmouth College, of the Working Group on African Political Economy, of the Contemporary African Political Economy Research Seminar and of the American Political Science Association for their comments. All shortcomings are mine.

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