Henning Finseraas (NTNU)

What Drives Voter Bias Against Muslim Politicians? An Experimental Examination

Venue: Campus Luigi Einaudi, room 3 D1 01

Abstract: We argue that stereotypes about the political beliefs and traits of Muslim candidates place them in a disadvantaged position when running for office. We run experiments to identify important stereotypes about Muslims as politicians, and then run follow-up experiments to examine whether these stereotypes explain unwillingness to vote for them. Our results show that the anti-Muslim bias is strongly influenced by beliefs about Muslim candidates’ positions on minority rights issues. The initial anti-Muslim bias is reduced by 50 percent when voters can use policy positions on these issues to select candidates, closing the gap in anti-Muslim bias between left- and right-wing respondents. We further find that respondents use candidate religion to select between candidates with similar policy positions, potentially creating a disadvantage for Muslims in within-party competitions. Our findings imply that the anti-Muslim bias will depend on the information environment.