Do Swiss Voters Discriminate against Candidates with a Migration Background?
In view of the upcoming Swiss national parliamentary elections this year, we discuss discrimination by voters against immigrant-origin candidates. Such discrimination in elections poses major challenges to liberal Western democracies and may contribute to the persisting political underrepresentation of the population with a migration background in Switzerland as in many other democratic legislatures.
In the autumn of this year, Swiss voters will elect their 246 representatives to the national parliament. There will be several candidates on the party lists who do not have a typical Swiss name which indicates that either they themselves, their parents or grandparents have immigrated to Switzerland.
Few Candidates for National Parliament have a Migration Background
And yet, candidates with a migration background are clearly underrepresented on party lists in Switzerland compared to their share in the general population. Our analyses of the 2015 Swiss National Council elections show that 13% of candidates had non-Swiss names, while 35% of the overall population and 18% of the enfranchised Swiss population are of immigrant origin. The foreign names of the candidates stem mostly from western European countries. However, there is also a considerable share of names from former Yugoslavia and Albania, as well as Hispanic, Arabic or Turkish names, which may be perceived as signifying more cultural distance.
The numbers regarding the elected representatives to the Swiss National Council 2015 are even more striking: less than 6% of those elected had a foreign name. Do voters who are reluctant to vote immigrant-origin candidates into political office contribute to this underrepresentation?
Explaining Electoral Discrimination
We call this phenomenon “electoral discrimination”. It describes electoral penalties incurred by candidates from minority groups running for political office, when majority voters prefer candidates who share their own identity traits. In the US context, numerous studies have explored the supposition that white voters tend to support white candidates over black and Hispanic ones. In the Swiss context, the electoral discrimination thesis holds that immigrant-origin candidates, bearing non-Swiss names, face potential discrimination in elections.
Measuring electoral discrimination empirically is a challenging task. Our research leverages a particularity of the Swiss electoral system (free-list proportional representation), which allows voters to cross off candidates from their ballots. In other words, Swiss voters can allocate not only positive but also negative preference votes to individual candidates.
For our research, we collected data from real ballots cast for the National Council elections 2015 in more than 1,000 Swiss municipalities. We used an open-access database to classify the names of all candidates into two categories: “Swiss” and “non-Swiss”. We then examined whether, all else being equal, candidates with “non- Swiss” names were at a disadvantage. The novelty of our project is that our unique dataset allows us to explore the phenomenon of electoral discrimination in a real-world environment. Compared with prior studies on the same topic – which have typically relied on aggregated electoral data, experiments or surveys – our analysis mitigates some important methodological concerns that have plagued this field of research.
Our results from a previous study employing this approach and focusing on the 2014 municipal elections in Zurich provide evidence that immigrant-origin candidates did incur a significant electoral penalty. That is, they received more negative preference votes compared to similar candidates with typical Swiss names. The effect was stronger for candidates who were running on lists of right and center-right parties than for those on lists of left parties.
These results may represent a pessimistic outlook for candidates to the Swiss National Council with a migration background, especially if they run for center-right or right parties. From a more optimistic perspective, however, we hope that our research will mark a step in the study of electoral discrimination and will raise awareness for this form of ethnic discrimination. Possibly, it might pave the way for increasing the presence of the immigrant-origin population in political offices in the future.
Lea Portmann is a Research Associate in Political Science at the University of Lucerne working for the nccr – on the move funded individual project “The Mobility of Migration Policies”.
Nenad Stojanović is an SNSF Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Geneva. He is affiliated to the same nccr – on the move project.
