28 Poertner, 2022; Whitby, 2007). Outside the US there are many studies suggesting voters prefer co-ethnic politicians (Aguilar, Cunow, Desposato, et al., 2015; Bermeo and Bhatia, 2017; Besco, 2015; Bird et al., 2016; Carlson, 2015; Chauchard, 2016; Goodyear-Grant and Tolley, 2019; Teney et al., 2010). In Europe, few experiments on ethnic/racial minority citizen assessments of politicians have been conducted. The only one I know about shows that the respondents have a significant negative bias against politicians with Arab names (Dahl and Nyrup, 2021), though non-experimental research points towards a co-ethnicity effect amongst voters in the UK (Fisher et al., 2014). Why might sharing the same migration background increase in-group voter preferences? First, voting citizens could be motivated through a preference towards descriptive representation in and of itself, without that leading to substantive representation (Fisher et al., 2014: 889; Ostfeld and Mutz, 2021). Some voting citizens have been found to choose descriptive representation over substantive representation, even when the two are at odds (Herron and Sekhon, 2005: 173). Descriptive representation has been shown to lead to greater societal respect (Ruedin, 2009) and showing the public your group has “ability to rule” (Mansbridge, 1999: 628) or as a “survival strategy” when faced with a lack of societal acceptance (hooks 1995 as cited in Lemi & Brown, 2019: 272). Ethnic minority voting citizens might be targeted by political parties (Goerres et al., 2020), or mobilized through civic (Fennema and Tillie, 1999), online (Kizgin et al., 2019) or personal (Geese, 2020) networks. The assumption of ethnically-based patronage networks may motivate voters to vote for their ethnic in-group members and the parties they are running for (Bermeo and Bhatia, 2017: 15) irrespective of whether patronage ensues or not. Even in a context where ethnic minority voter mobilization is discouraged, researchers find ethnic affinity voter preferences are prevalent (Teney et al., 2010: 275, 279) and ethnic minority voters “vote as a bloc” (Bergh and Bjørklund, 2011: 313, 323). Second, apart from the preference for in-group politicians, sharing the same ethnicity might be viewed as a heuristic for sharing the same policy position. There is much less literature on this second mechanism (except Arnesen et al., 2019; Lerman and Sadin, 2016) and this dissertation aims to change that. Religion I understand religion as a group that an individual can identify with and which is associated with a set of beliefs, practices, and rituals and thus encompasses both organized faith systems and personal spiritual beliefs. There is much less literature on co-religious voting even though Islam has become “politicized” (Fleischmann et al., 2011), “mobiliz[ed]” electorally (Schmuck and Matthes, 2019: 739) and “racialized” (Bracke and Hernández Aguilar, 2020; Elver, 2012; Meer and Modood, 2012) already since before 9/11 (Swyngedouw and Ivaldi, 2001: 15). Even those with positive
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjY0ODMw