Steered by ethnicity and/or SES cues? An examination of party selectors’ stereotypes about ethnic minority aspirants

ABSTRACT

This study discusses whether party selectors’ stereotypes about ethnic minority aspirants help to explain the political under-representation of ethnic minorities. Specific attention goes to the question of how the social stereotype of ethnic minorities as low socioeconomic status citizens affects political stereotypes about ethnic minority aspirants. This innovative intersectionality research is built on an original survey experiment conducted among Flemish party selectors. Ethnic minority aspirants are perceived as more leftist than majority aspirants, but not as less competent or trustworthy. Furthermore, the effects of aspirants’ ethnicity are not moderated by their socioeconomic status. The implications are twofold. First, discrimination against ethnic minority aspirants based on their ethnic background is only likely to occur among rightist party selectors. Second, that ethnic minority aspirants with a high socioeconomic status are perceived as equally competent than their ethnic majority counterparts contradicts previous assumptions that ethnic minority aspirants need to be better qualified than ethnic majority aspirants. In sum, this study nuances previous concerns that party selector discrimination is an important barrier for the representation of ethnic minorities.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic minorities
• political representation
• candidate selection
• stereotypes
• SES

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Bram Wauters and Marc van de Wardt for their continuous feedback on this research, as well as Audrey Vandeleene and Gert-Jan Put for their comments on a previous version of this paper, which was presented at the 2019 ECPR General Conference in Wroclaw. I also want to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers, whose comments strongly improved this article. This work was financially supported by the Research Foundation Flanders [FWO grant number 52108].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Weaver (2012) for a more nuanced view.

2 Figures are restricted to candidate lists affiliated with a national party (including cartel lists) and exclude candidates and representatives of Western-European and Northern-European origin as they are not perceived as having a visible immigrant background.

3 All figures exclude citizens of Western-European and Northern-European origin as they are not perceived as having a visible immigrant background.

4 The lack of information about which aspirants did not succeed in getting nominated as candidates makes it impossible to make statements about the importance of the aspiration stage.

5 Not all national parties have local branches in every municipality.

6 This research was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of Ghent University. Participants were informed about their rights.

7 The Maghrebi community is the most prominent non-Western minority group in Flanders whose political role and representation is one of the most debated (Janssen, 2020).

8 In the remaining of this paper, aspirants with a Moroccan and Flemish name will be shortly referred to as ‘Moroccan’ and ‘Flemish’ aspirants. Note that as passive suffrage in Flemish local elections is limited to Belgian and non-Belgian EU citizens, ‘Moroccan aspirants’ are thus citizens with the Belgian nationality but with a Moroccan background.

9 The participants were asked to rate eight statements about immigration and immigrants, three of which were computed into a single measure of immigrant attitudes (‘people of non-western origin who live in Flanders enrich Flanders’ cultural life’, ‘people of non-western origin who live in Flanders increase criminality rates’ and ‘people of non-western origin who live in Flanders turned Flanders into a better place to live’) (Cronbach’s Alpha = 0.847).

10 The participants’ ethnic background was measured as well. Only 7 of the 597 participants were of non-Western-European origin. Considering the low number of ethnic minority party chairs and that excluding them from the analysis did not change the results significantly (results in the online appendix), the results presented below are based on the entire sample.

11 The dataset which allows to replicate the analyses can be found online at zenodo.org with the following doi: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4434293.

12 When restricting the sample to those participants who were first asked to evaluate the Moroccan aspirant and thereafter the Flemish aspirant significant differences emerged, however (observations weighted for SES and policy). These participants rated Moroccan aspirants as significantly more competent (M=5.31) than Flemish aspirants (M = 5.08) (t = −6.927, p < 0.01). They equally evaluated the former (M = 5.26) as more trustworthy than the latter (M = 5.15) (t = −6.93, p < 0.01).

13 When looking at differences between parties, the same trends emerge. Participants belonging to both leftist and rightist parties perceive Moroccan aspirants as significantly more leftist, with exception of the Christian-democratic and liberal party. None of them perceive Moroccan aspirants as less competent and only party chairs belonging to the far right party perceive Moroccan aspirants as significantly less trustworthy. Figures showing the interaction effects between parties are included in the online appendix.

14 When looking at differences between parties, I do not find support for hypotheses 4–6 among any of the party categories. Figures showing the interaction effects between parties are included in the online appendix.

15 482 of the 597 participants had a tertiary degree.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the Research Foundation Flanders [FWO grant number 52108].