Event Time
Wednesday, September 2, 2026
Noon to 1:15 PM
Open to the Yale community and invited scholars.
Location
Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Room A002
77 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Speaker
Sean Westwood, CSAP Visiting Fellow, Associate Professor of Government, Dartmouth University
Description
American Politics & Public Policy Workshop
Abstract
Debates over whether political parties should tolerate bigoted candidates often start with an empirical premise: that voters will reject such candidates outright. Contemporary controversies — over figures on both the right and the left — focus on if a meaningful bloc of voters treats bigotry as a disqualifier, a “red line” no other plausible candidate feature can offset. Yet existing research estimates only the average electoral penalty bigotry imposes, not whether red-line behavior exists. We define this voter type formally and estimate its prevalence, focusing on antisemitism, a form of bigotry that has risen sharply in recent years. We embed respondent-tailored “dominance-favored” choice tasks in a national U.S. survey — tasks created to make an antisemitic candidate maximally attractive on party, policy, and personal attributes. We then use partial identification methods to bound the share of red-line voters in the electorate, accounting for inattention and the attributes a survey cannot enumerate. At most 17% of Americans treat overt antisemitism as a red line, with a lower bound near 13%; the share falls to single digits when the appeal is an implicit “dog-whistle,” does not differ significantly across partisan or racial subgroups, and rises only to 29.6% even when allowing voters to abstain. These revealed-preference estimates are statistically indistinguishable from those we estimate for anti-Black racism and fall far below the 88% who, when asked directly, say they would never support such a candidate. What people say about their willingness to tolerate bigotry overstates what they are willing to do about it. When faced with realistic alternatives, most Americans weigh a candidate’s bigotry against other salient traits, which means openly prejudiced candidates remain more viable than direct survey questions imply.
Biography
Sean Westwood is an associate professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College and director of the Polarization Research Lab (PRL). His primary area of research is political behavior and public opinion. His work focuses on understanding where partisan biases originate, where they manifest (inside and outside political domains), and their bounds. He is particularly interested at examining how partisanship and information from political elites affect the behavior of citizens. He has expertise in both survey methods and computational social science. His work has been published in journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Political Science Review, Nature Human Behavior, and the American Journal of Political Science.