Abstract
Previous studies have documented ethnic/racial bias in politicians’ constituency service, but less is known about the circumstances under which such ethnocentric responsiveness is curbed. We propose and test two hypotheses in this regard:the electoral incentives hypothesis, predicting that incentives for (re)election crowd out politicians’ potential biases, andthe candidate selection hypothesis, stipulating that minority constituents can identify responsive legislators by using candidates’ partisan affiliation and stated policy preferences as heuristics. We test these hypotheses through a field experiment on the responsiveness of incumbent local politicians in Denmark (N= 2,395), varying ethnicity, gender, and intention to vote for the candidate in the upcoming election, merged with data on their electoral performance and their stated policy preferences from a voting advice application. We observe marked ethnocentric responsiveness and find no indication that electoral incentives mitigate this behavior. However, minority voters can use parties’ and individual candidates’ stances on immigration to identify responsive politicians.
Highlights
Political responsiveness and political equality are fundamental aspects of representative democracy
The results show that requests signed with an ethnic minority alias received 16.2 percentage points fewer replies than did those sent by an ethnic majority alias
Building on the assumption that politicians are extrinsically motivated by a desire forelection, we explored whether electoral incentives animate legislators to be responsive to their constituents independent of the constituents’ ethnic
Summary
Political responsiveness and political equality are fundamental aspects of representative democracy.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
