Explaining the Disability Vote Penalty in Finland: Resources, Returns or Prejudices?

Previous observational studies have shown that disabled candidates receive significantly fewer votes in elections than non-disabled candidates. In contrast, studies based on survey experiments show that voters in general do not have strong prejudices against disabled candidates when making their voting choices. In this study, we approach these potentially contradictory results by analyzing candidate survey data from the Finnish 2019 and 2023 parliamentary elections, which included questions on candidate disability. We use Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to divide the observed gap in votes between disabled and non-disabled candidates into three parts: 1) differences caused by differences in endowments (i.e., campaign spending, campaign modes, party choice), 2) differences in the returns of these endowments (i.e., do disabled candidates need more resources to achieve the same amount of votes as non-disabled candidates) and 3) the unexplained part, which includes possible prejudices against disabled candidates (among other things). With this method, we are able to estimate if the disability gap is principally a result of disabled candidates having fewer resources for campaigning or if their campaigning is less effective than that of non-disabled candidates and to which extent, if any, prejudices play a role in the electoral process.