Do Politicians Discriminate against Ethnic Minority Constituents? A Field Experiment on Social Interactions between Citizens and Swedish Local Politicians

Abstract

In ethnically diverse societies, are citizens treated equally by their political representatives? Several field experiments find that politicians discriminate in their daily communication with voters. However, these studies only focus on the USA and South Africa and may overestimate the degree of discrimination by ignoring sex and socio-economic status. We address these shortcomings by investigating ethnic discrimination in Sweden. In an email experiment, all 812 municipal commissioners were randomly contacted by voters with Arabic- or Swedish-sounding names. Our results do not show any clear signs of discrimination; thus, previous results might not be generalisable to Sweden or similar democracies.

Discrimination in marketized welfare services: a field experiment on Swedish schools

“…It mobilizes particularly against immigrants with a background in the Middle East, and the general discourse surrounding this group has hardened. Moreover, immigrants from this part of the world have been found to be discriminated against in both the labor and housing markets and, to some extent, in interactions with public officials and politicians (e.g., Bursell, 2014;Larsson Taghizadeh et al, 2022). In sum, from an SES as well as ethnic and political perspective, Sweden might be less divergent than its reputation holds.…”

Discrimination by politicians against religious minorities: Experimental evidence from the UK

“…In this paper we ask whether local politicians of different political parties display systematic bias against constituents with stereotypically Jewish and Muslim names. A growing literature documents discrimination by elected representatives against their constituents, based on race or religion, through their official duties, in the United States (Butler and Broockman, 2011; Costa, 2017; Gell-Redman et al, 2018; Grose, 2014; Lajevardi, 2018; Mendez and Grose, 2018), South Africa (McClendon, 2016), and Sweden (Larsson Taghizadeh et al, 2020). Similar bias is found by unelected officials (Hughes et al, 2019; Adman and Jansson, 2017).…”