Dissertation

Exclusionary Politics: Examining the Barriers for Historically Marginalized Candidates and Congresspeople

My dissertation examines the structural and behavioral barriers that historically marginalized candidates and legislators face across different stages of American political careers.

At the center of my project is a focus on congressional committee assignments. My first paper asks whether the public’s racial and gender stereotypes shape expectations about which committees newly elected House members “belong” in. Using a pre-registered survey experiment with 2,500 respondents, I show that Black and Latine representatives are significantly less likely to be assigned to prestigious committees and significantly more likely to be sorted into stereotypically minority-associated ones, even in low-information environments where respondents know nothing about a legislator’s qualifications or policy positions. These patterns persist regardless of the respondent’s own racial or ethnic identity.

The second paper focuses on the career-long consequences of this early committee sorting. Using complete House committee assignment data, I demonstrate that women and racialized minority legislators who begin their careers on low-prestige “burden” committees face systematically diminished long-term career prospects: they are less likely to ever reach prestigious committee seats and are faster at attaining less desirable committee work compared to White male colleagues.

The third paper examines the election stage using a survey experiment, finding that Black candidates navigate an asymmetric political environment, where group-centric campaign appeals produce no meaningful rewards among co-racial voters, while generating significant electoral penalties among White voters with low racial guilt.

Together, these papers demonstrate the persistence of exclusionary practices that systematically diminish minority congressional representation, shape campaign choices, and structure access to institutional power.