What drives the propensity to vote for ethnic-minority-interest parties?

The study of ethnic-minorities’s voting behaviour explain the loyalty of ethnic-minority voters to social-democratic parties by two different mechanisms: that they vote on the basis of their social economic-position or that they vote on the basis of their ethnic identification, a form of socio-tropic voting based on the interests of their ethnic group. Such socio-tropic voting made them loyal to social-democratic parties in most European countries; however, research on the 2017 elections in the Netherlands shows that a segment of them has become estranged from social-democrats and now votes for ethnic-minority-interest parties. In 2021, more ethnic-minority-interest parties arose nationally, raising the question how they compete over the different communities of ethnic-minority voters. Using the unique Dutch Ethnic Minority Election Survey 2021, of the election year in which three ethnic-minority-interest parties competed (DENK, BIJ1, NIDA), we shed new light on the preference for such parties in two ways. As we distinguish between multiple ethnic-minority-interest parties. These differ in political positions, in particular where it comes to moral conservatism, and in which ethnic communities their candidates are rooted in, we can disentangle the alignment of voters by ethnic origin and by political positions. Our findings show that the new BIJ1 particularly draws citizens who perceive immigrant-group discrimination, whereas DENK and NIDA attract mostly religious Muslims voters who support multiculturalism, and also who perceive discrimination. Moreover, Asian-Dutch (other than Turkish-Dutch) and Latin-American Dutch (other than Surinamese-Dutch) do not vote for these ethnic-minority-interest parties.