2022/10/25 by Sanne van Oosten · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Gender Politics and Representation #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Populism, Right-Wing Movements
paper · doi:10.55271/jps000114
How do voters evaluate female Muslim politicians? The literature mainly approaches voter evaluations of underrepresented groups from a unitary perspective, focusing on either female or minoritized politicians, leaving Muslim politicians out of the picture altogether. I take an intersectional approach and consider a finding intersectional when evaluations of a Muslim woman politician is significantly different from both non-religious women and Muslim men. I test this by running survey experiments amongst 3056 respondents in France, Germany, and the Netherlands and presenting 18,336 randomly constructed profiles of hypothetical politicians varying their religion, gender, and migration background. Voters have a strong negative bias against Muslim politicians. However, voters do not assess female Muslim politicians significantly differently than their male counterparts. These conclusions have implications for researchers studying intersectionality using conjoint experiments and researchers concerned with the electoral consequences of diversity in a political landscape increasingly influenced by populist radical right parties. Keywords: Intersectionality, Muslims, Islamophobia, Muslim women, Descriptive representation Please find all replication materials here: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/JZYR7