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This study approaches the underrepresentation of ethnic and migrant minorities (EMMs) in political assemblies from the perspective of candidate recruitment and examines how white normativity as an ideal shapes the recruitment process. The article draws on empirical interview data from the 2017 Finnish municipal elections. Through a qualitative analysis of parties' recruiting agents' (n = 24) and EMM candidates' (n = 12) interviews, the article provides nuanced insights into the informal aspects of candidate recruitment and more perspectives into the discussions of 'ideal' and 'acceptable' candidates. The analysis identifies four discursive strategies that the parties use to describe their (lack of) efforts to recruit EMM candidates. The analysis of these strategies deepens the analytical understanding of the persistent underrepresentation of EMMs in candidate lists by explaining how recruitment is shaped by white normativity.

Migrant candidates tend to win fewer preference votes compared to native candidates across electoral systems. We focus on two general explanations for the observed migrant–native vote gap: (1) disproportionate amounts of electorally valuable resources and (2) an electoral penalty whereby migrant candidates who hold similar resources as native candidates are treated differently by the voters. Three types of resources are included as independent variables: personal, social, and contextual. We analyse candidate survey data from the 2017 Finnish municipal elections and apply the twofold Kitagawa–Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition method. The results show that group differences in the distribution of political capital, length of residence, and size of the municipality are associated with the vote gap, as well as the inability of migrant candidates to capitalise on campaign support from people in their immediate social environment.

This paper measures both individual-and contextual effects of generalised trust on Europeans' attitudes towards immigration. Our data come from round 7 of the European Social Survey (ESS) with which it is possible to measure generalised trust also at the subnational level (NUTS levels). This enables us to capture evident variation in generalised trust within countries. Our main contribution is to test whether two persons who have the same level of generalised trust, but who live in regions differing in mean generalised trust, have different opinions about immigrants. Our results show, first of all, that people with high generalised trust have positive immigration attitudes. Second, living in a high-trusting region does not seem to generally encourage even more positive attitudes towards immigrants. Third, there is, however, another type of contextual effect that moderates the relationship between individual-level generalised trust and pro-immigration attitudes. A high-trusting regional context encourages high-trusting people to develop even more positive attitudes towards immigrants.

We study the influence of argument sources on argument quality evaluations. Argument source refers to the person who present the argument. We ask whether partial, impartial and reluctant sources generate different evaluations of argument quality. We explore the source effect via a survey experiment where participants are asked to evaluate the quality of political arguments. Previous research on source partiality mainly concerns persuasion. The results from these studies suggest that source characteristics such as expertise and trustworthiness affect the persuasiveness of communication. Both impartial and reluctant sources have been observed to promote persuasion, whereas partial sources tend to hinder it. However, the evidence on the difference between impartial and reluctant sources are inconclusive, and research on argument quality evaluations is scarce. In our study, respondents are randomly allocated into four conditions according to who presents a political argument: Control (no argument source); Partial Source, Reluctant Source and Impartial Source. Our results show that overall impartial sources give rise to higher evaluations of argument quality in comparison to reluctant sources, but not in comparison to partial sources. Furthermore, reluctant sources are also perceived low in credibility.