Evaluating the Party Leader Premium of British Minority Voters

• In Event: Voting Behavior for and in Parliament

Abstract

How do British minority voters evaluate the race and ethnicity of MP and party leader candidates? How do these evaluations change when those candidates are co-ethnics (same ethnicity), pan-ethnics (same race), and Black and Asian minority ethnic (same minority)? We fielded a conjoint survey experiment on British minority voters from the Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Caribbean, African, and Chinese diasporas. Utilizing a novel double conjoint design where we randomize the attributes for both the MP and party leader, we estimate the relative premium that a respondent places on shared party leader characteristics over shared MP characteristics, along with how this premium changes when such shared characteristics shift from same ethnicity to a broader “people of color” identity. Our study contributes to the study of minority voters and candidates in parliamentary democracies around the world, along with shifting interpretations of pan-ethnicity in contexts outside of the United States.

Author

• John Cho, Yale University