But candidates’ tendency to seek votes based on these descriptive characteristics has prompted debate about what matters more to voters when they’re at the ballot box.
Feminist icon Madeleine Albright recently faced backlash for encouraging women to vote for Hillary Clinton because she is a woman, and Gloria Steinem was criticized for saying young women supported Bernie Sanders in order to meet men.
Rebecca Kreitzer, a professor of public policy at UNC, said comments like these are counterproductive.
“Both of them have kind of walked back on their statements because they realized that what they were doing was kind of creating an assumption that all women believe the same things, and that all women should do the same thing,” she said.
Kreitzer said descriptive representation is the idea that if candidates share a politically relevant characteristic with voters, the candidate will better represent them.
Andrew Reynolds, a political science professor at UNC, said descriptive representation is one of three elements of representation that voters consider — the other two being geography and ideology.
“Sometimes I like to say that it means nothing in the sense that it shouldn’t matter if you’re male or female, if you’re black or white, if you’re gay or straight as a candidate,” Reynolds said. “But, at the same time as it meaning nothing, it means everything.”
He said while no one aspect of representation dominates the others, voting for descriptive representation is becoming more significant in the United States among both majority and minority groups, due to an increasing emphasis on including marginalized voices.
