70 2 targeting by political parties (Goerres et al., 2020) and the assumption that descriptive representation will lead to substantive representation (Arnesen et al., 2019; Cutler, 2002; Lerman and Sadin, 2016). That is why I pre-registered the following hypothesis: H1.a. Racial/ethnic minority respondents prefer politicians of their own racial/ethnic minority group to politicians of a different group. Religion Cross-sectional research shows that Muslims are more likely to vote for Muslims (Azabar et al., 2020; Heath et al., 2015), not necessarily because of their faith itself, but because of the exclusion they experience as a Muslim (Azabar et al., 2020: 8) for which there is clear evidence on the labor market (Fernández-Reino et al., 2023; Weichselbaumer, 2020). As far as I know, there have not been any candidate experiments with Muslim politicians conducted on the European mainland (for US and UK examples see Bai 2021; Campbell and Cowley 2014), the only candidate experiment measuring voting likelihood I know finds a strong negative bias against Arab politicians (Dahl and Nyrup, 2021: 209) in which “Arab” might serve as a proxy for “Muslim.” People often assume that individuals with a background in Muslim-majority countries are automatically Muslim (Di Stasio et al., 2021; Otjes and Krouwel, 2019) which is why I explicitly disentangle migration background and religion. Over the last two decades, Islam has become a severely politicized topic (Fleischmann et al., 2011; Schmuck and Matthes, 2019), exacerbated by the fact that Islam is seen as an obstacle to integration, mostly justified through political liberalism and a rejection of religious fundamentalism (Helbling and Traunmüller, 2018). Amongst Muslims, politicization of Islam can lead to rejection of stereotypes (Verkuyten and Yildiz, 2009), stronger collective identity and identity-threat among Muslims (Frey, 2020; Lajevardi and Oskooii, 2018; Voas and Fleischmann, 2012), causing Muslim voters to prefer Muslim politicians. That is why I pre-registered the following hypothesis: H1.b. Muslim respondents prefer Muslim politicians to non-religious and Christian politicians. Gender Research on the “gender affinity effect” (Dolan, 2008), the tendency for women to vote for woman politicians, has mixed results. Some studies find that women reward woman candidates (Brians, 2005; Kirkland and Coppock, 2018; van Erkel, 2019) while others find no significant differences (Cargile and Pringle, 2019; Coffé and von Schoultz, 2020; Cowley, 2013: 148) and some finding women punish woman candidates (Bauer, 2015; Eggers et al., 2018; Mo, 2015). The mixed results of individual studies may be because when discussions about underrepresentation of women are prominent, women are
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