Electoral Discrimination of Immigrant-origin Candidates in the 2015 Swiss National Elections

What accounts for the political underrepresentation of immigrant-origin minorities in liberal democracies? In some places, citizens with immigrant background have fewer opportunities to get on electoral lists because party gatekeepers are biased against them. In other places, party leaders actually promote such candidates in order to attract the immigrant votes, but majority voters tend to discriminate against them. The extent of this latter form of discrimination, we shall call it Electoral Discrimination, depends on the electoral system. It is very acute in open-list PR systems. In particular, in the peculiar ("free-list") PR used in Switzerland voters can cast not only preference votes for candidates they want to support, but they can also allocate negative preference votes by deliberately crossing off the names of candidates they do not want to see elected. To our knowledge, in no other country the elections to the national parliament allow voters to cross off candidates from their ballots. So the Swiss PR system leaves a large freedom of choice to individual voters. However, its possible drawback is Electoral Discrimination: If majority voters want to discriminate against minority candidates, there is hardly an electoral system that is as inviting as the Swiss system. Against this background, we analyse election outcomes and empirically explore the extent of electoral discrimination in the 2015 elections to the lower house (the National Council) of the Swiss Parliament. We use a novel and original approach, as we could gain access to real ballots cast. This unique database allows us to track the voting behaviour of citizens by analysing the patters of crossing off with regard to candidates with foreign-sounding names. Our detailed data from a large number of Swiss communes furthermore allows to generate evidence with respect to the context dependency of discriminatory behaviour. The deep diversity of the Swiss cantons and municipalities in terms of language, religion, the share of migrant population, political attitudes towards migrants, political culture and the electoral district magnitude allows to draw interesting comparisons, which results might be of interest well beyond the Swiss case.