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Racial Coalition Building in Local Elections: Elite Cues and Cross-Ethnic Voting. By Andrea Benjamin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 202 pp., $99.99 (Cloth)
Partisanship is a powerful drug, and remains one of the most powerful predictors of vote choice in U.S. elections. We view candidates and policies through partisan-tinted lenses, and feel strong emotional attachments to our party. In most local elections, however, the partisan factor is removed. While politically sophisticated voters might be able to surmise a candidate's underlying partisanship, most voters instead are marking their ballots without the use of party cues, falling back on other cues such as race and ethnicity or elite endorsements. White, Black, and Latino voters all prefer to vote for members of their own ethnicity or race, but what if no such option is available? Into this void of political science, Benjamin posits that three factors determine vote choice: in-group elite endorsements, the racial and ethnic salience of the campaign, and the race and ethnicity of the viable candidates. Focusing on elite cues, Benjamin opens with an examination of 20 years of mayoral election history in four cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston), then turns to multiple unique datasets and survey experiments to explore her Co-ethnic Elite Cues Theory.
White voters and candidates are included in her analysis, but they are not the focus. Benjamin is interested in the predictors of support for Black–Latino coalitions, and how they might lead to better representation of these communities. U.S. cities...