The Latina Advantage: Gender, Race, and Political Success

Introduction. Challenges to the Double Disadvantage Theory

INTRODUCTION Challenges to the Double Disadvantage Theory The political landscape of the 2008 presidential election, with Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton as major party candidates for president, highlighted a number of important issues concerning the impact of race and gender. Questions arose regarding the predicted level of voter support for women and racial/ethnic-minority political candidates . Would a black or a female presidential candidate be electable in the United States? How does identity impact the level of support for diverse political candidates? This book intends to make a contribution to the political debate on these topics. As the electoral environment becomes more diverse, researchers are challenged to answer questions involving the influence of both gender and racial/ethnic identity. Is the public swayed by a politician’s race/ethnicity or gender as they decide whom to support? Further, how does the interaction of race/ethnicity and gender influence people’s decisions as they assess diverse politicians? How do demographic traits contribute to the continued underrepresentation of both minorities and women? Minority women, as both women and members of a minority racial/ ethnic group, may be treated according to both gender stereotypes and racial stereotypes and expectations. This combination of gender effects and racial effects can pose additional challenges for minority women in their attempt to reach electoral parity. Earlier work on minority women used a “double jeopardy” (Beale 1979) or multiple jeopardy (King 1988) approach to argue that various disadvantages can accumulate and produce distinctive forms of oppression. In line with this, previous work (Carroll and Strimling 1983; Epstein 1973; Githens and Prestage 1977) offered a “double disadvantage” hypothesis, which states that minority 2 The Latina Advantage women will suffer politically from being women and from being a minority (Darcy, Hadley, and Kirksey 1997). This early research relied on evidence that “black women are less well represented than women generally or blacks generally,” which “appears to confirm the double disadvantage hypothesis: black women suffer politically from being women and from being black” (Darcy et al. 1997:448). There is more recent evidence that demonstrates that black women have made greater gains than white women within their respective electoral environments (Darcy and Hadley 1988; Moncrief, Thompson, and Schuhmann 1991). Research conducted in the late 1990s and early 2000s on Latina elected officials (Montoya, Hardy-Fanta, and Garcia 2000; Takash 1993; Hardy-Fanta 1993), suggested that Latinas are elected at higher rates than their male counterparts (García Bedolla, Tate, and Wong 2005:167). This evidence sparked debate over whether there are possible “overrepresentations” of minority female legislators in their respective minority delegations in the U.S. Congress, as compared to white females in their delegations. This debate includes the question of whether minority women legislators are uniquely positioned to benefit in the legislative process from the intersectionality of their ethnicity and gender, which Fraga et al. (2005) define as their “strategic intersectionality.” I offer a unique contribution to the literature, by proposing a complimentary theory that explains how minority women political candidates, more specifically Latinas, can gain potential electoral advantages from the intersection of their gender and race/ethnicity. I argue and present evidence that counters the theory of double jeopardy or additive electoral disadvantages for minority women. Minority females encounter a positive interaction of their gender and race/ethnicity that results in fewer electoral disadvantages . As a result, they perform better electorally than minority men among some key voters. This interactive dynamic can help explain the dramatic electoral success of minority females in electoral politics in the last ten years. Political Phenomenon for Latinas Evidence of Latinas’ potential diminished political disadvantages can be seen by examining the current representation of racial/ethnic-minority women in elective office compared to their male counterparts. As of 2005, women of color at the state and national levels made up a larger Challenges to the Double Disadvantage Theory 3 proportion of their minority delegation, compared to their respective minority male counterparts, than white women compared with their white male counterparts (García Bedolla et al. 2005:166). Racial/ethnicminority women currently account for a greater share of minority political representatives than white women do of white elected officials, in both the U.S. Congress and state legislatures. In the 108th Congress (2003–2005), Latinas made up 29 percent of the Latino membership, black women made up 33 percent of the black membership, and Asian American females made up 29 percent...