Why Do We Pay Attention to Candidate Race, Gender, and Party? A Theory of the Development of Political Categorization Schemes∗

It has been known for some time that voters use social and political groups to infer politicians’ positions on various issues, but relatively little is known about what factors moderate the use of cues such as a candidate’s race, gender, or political party. In this paper I develop a formal information-processing model based on categorization psychology to investigate the impact of factors such as the frequency of female politicians on the organization of voters’ belief systems. The model’s central predictions, that increased balance between genders, races, or even political parties reduces voters’ reliance on these cues and that citizens rely on these cues only to the extent that they are correlated with policy positions, are borne out by data on Congressional elections from the 1978-2004 American National Election Studies.