What's in an Ally? Development of the Political Allyship Behavior Scale (PABS) to Explore White Politicians' Genuine and Performative Allyship Toward Black Americans

Abstract

The racial turnout gap is a significant concern to the integrity of the democratic process in the United States, as it leads to underrepresentation of the perspectives of marginalized racial groups. This dissertation proposes that one way to reduce the turnout gap is by White politicians engaging in genuine allyship to marginalized groups. Across three studies, I explored how Black Americans define genuine and performative allyship from politicians, developed a behaviorally based instrument to measure political allyship, and investigated how experiencing political allyship impacts Black Americans’ intended political participation. First, a sample of Black Americans generated critical incidents of genuine and performative political allyship, which were then thematically analyzed and consolidated. Another sample of Black Americans rated these incidents on allyship, and incidents that did not strongly signal either genuine or performative allyship were dropped. Next, I conducted a card sort task and used k-means cluster analysis to create groups of similar allyship behaviors, which revealed that the construct of political allyship is comprised of three clusters (i.e., themes) of genuine allyship and two clusters of performative allyship. Finally, these clusters were used to create, validate, and test a novel scale to measure political allyship – the Political Allyship Behavior Scale (PABS). After assessing interrater reliability and establishing construct validity of the PABS, I tested the practical utility of the PABS by having Black Americans use the measure to rate a fictional politician. Not only was the PABS able to reliably distinguish between politicians who engaged in genuine versus performative allyship, but it also showed that Black Americans reported higher intended political participation when they experienced genuine allyship from a White politician. This research may help politicians better understand how their allyship is perceived by Black Americans and make strides toward closing the turnout gap and promoting equality in representation.