Are Politicians Biased against Ethnic Minority Candidates? Experimental Evidence from Norway

To what extent is the underrepresentation of ethnic minorities in politics due to ethnic bias? While this question has interested researchers for a long time, direct evidence of ethnic bias in party-controlled nomination processes is scarce. We conducted survey experiments with politicians and voters in Norway, where parties control the nomination process, to examine bias against ethnic minority candidates. The politicians evaluated candidate profiles with randomly assigned information about the candidates’ ethnic backgrounds. Contrary to our expectations, we find that ethnic minority candidates receive higher quality scores and better rankings than ethnic majority candidates. However, the results of a list experiment with voters show that a substantial share of right-wing voters has reservations against voting for a party list with many ethnic minority candidates. Consequently, our study suggests that while the political elite wants ethnically diverse party lists, for some parties, such lists might have an electoral cost.