Double Discrimination: How Voters and Parties Withhold Incumbency Advantages from Immigrant-Origin Politicians

Recent research shows that voters tend to discriminate against candidates with a migration background, which can be a factor leading to the political under-representation of immigrant-origin populations in Western legislatures. Yet, does discrimination persist after candidates with a migration background are in fact elected to parliament? We examine this aspect by introducing a novel longitudinal data set that covers more than 9,000 unique candidate-year observations in 84 Swiss local elections between 2006 and 2018. Non-Swiss candidate names that we identify based on their year of first registration in Swiss municipalities serve as a proxy for the migration background. We first confirm that candidates with non-Swiss names are disadvantaged because voters tend to allocate them fewer preference votes in the open-list PR electoral system. Second, a regression discontinuity design that leverages the quasi-random allocation of incumbency status around the cut-off of the last election finds that candidates with non-Swiss names do not benefit from an “incumbency bonus” while those with typically Swiss names do. This contradicts approaches that highlight stereotyping by voters as an explanation for electoral discrimination, which expect that discrimination should be reduced if candidates are able to demonstrate electability and competence via their incumbency status. Rather our findings suggest that taste-based approaches are better suitable to explain discrimination by voters. Finally, we show that parties consider this voter discrimination and place candidates with non-Swiss names, irrespective of their incumbency status, on lower ballot positions than similar candidates with typically Swiss names. The findings imply that discrimination against immigrant-origin candidates is highly persistent and even prevalent among candidates who have already proven themselves in political office, among both voters and parties.