Abstract
Can qualifications help candidates from historically marginalized groups win over out-group voters? We help answer this question with an original conjoint experiment fielded on a face-to-face survey conducted in three Afghan provinces between 2016 and 2017. The conjoint asked over 2,400 Afghan respondents to rank and choose between profiles of hypothetical candidates with varying gender, ethnic and educational attributes. We explore whether candidate qualifications – as measured by educational attainment – can amplify respondents’ support for hypothetical candidates from two social groups traditionally underrepresented in Afghan politics: women and Hazaras, a predominately Shi’a ethnic minority group. We find that higher qualifications consistently increase male (non-Hazara) respondents’ ranking and likelihood of choosing profiles with female (Hazara) candidates. These gains, however, do not completely offset male (non-Hazara) respondents’ in-group biases. Qualifications help but are not enough to dismantle voter preferences for in-group candidates.
Keywords
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
