Discrimination Against Minorities: An Experimental Study of the Effect of Candidate Gender and Origin on Voters’ Behavior Regarding Prejudice

Women and people with immigrant backgrounds are internationally under-represented in politics.  Often the under-representation of minorities is explained with voters’ prejudice against these groups. The voters think that women and people with migrant backgrounds should play a minor role in the society, which is why they shouldn’t exert political influence. Whether and to what extent this prejudice can explain the under-representation of women and people with immigrant background in the German Bundestag is the focus of this paper. Answering this question is difficult to operationalize using classical empirical studies like surveys. There the number of female candidates and candidates with immigrant background is generally low. Besides that evaluating these candidates depends on other factors than gender or immigration background (eg. social structure, party affiliation, ...). Experimental designs provide the ability to keep contextual variables constant, while varying the focused variables systematically. Such an Online-Experiment will be studied. This paper analyses if female candidates and candidates with immigrant background are not elected because the voters have prejudices. Data of the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) will be used.