Abstract
All citizens are not listened to equally, despite the importance of responsiveness and listening to different theories of democracy. We take an intersectional approach to make several novel predictions about how citizens’ identities, the topic of constituent messages, and the identities of elected officials combine to influence responsiveness. These theories lead us to expect (and empirically confirm) that Black men in particular - more than other racial and gender groups - are systematically ignored by elected officials. We implement a wide-scale experiment with U.S. local elected officials (N = 23,738) to test our predictions. Extending previous work, we vary the race, gender, and topic of the constituent’s message, and we observe if elected officials both open and reply to constituents’ messages. We find that Black men are systematically ignored, regardless of the message they send. In contrast, elected officials respond less to Black women when they discuss race and less to White women when they discuss gender. We discuss the implications of this study for work on responsiveness in democratic government.
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CITATION STYLE
Busby, E. C., Thompson, A. I., Vierbuchen, T., & Yi, S. (2026). Unheard Voices: The Importance of Intersectionality in Responsiveness and the Systematic Ignoring of Black Men by Elected Officials. Political Behavior, 48(2), 585–611. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-025-10042-6
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