What drives the propensity to vote for ethnic-minority-interest parties?

Abstract

In the study of ethnic-minorities’ voting preferences it is evidenced that ethnic minorities have favoured social-democratic parties in most European countries. In the Netherlands, however, a part of them has divided from the social-democrats in 2017 and voted a new ethnic-minority-interest party into parliament. In the 2021 election, multiple ethnic-minority-interest parties arose in the Dutch political landscape, raising the question how they compete over ethnic-minority voters, who form an increasing share of the electorate but remain marginalized in politics. Using the Dutch Ethnic Minority Election Survey 2021, we shed light on the propensity to vote (PTV) for three ethnic-minority-interest parties: DENK, BIJ1 and NIDA. First, since the parties differ in which ethnic communities their candidates are rooted, we test ethnic community-based differences in their party preferences. Second, we disentangle the role of economic positions from the role of cultural (e.g., migration and group discrimination) and moral (e.g. religiosity and conservative-authoritarian) explanations. Our findings show that explanations of the PTVs for DENK and NIDA do not differ substantially and are higher among religious Muslim voters who support multiculturalism and who perceive discrimination. Among migrant-background citizens, the more radical BIJ1-party particularly scores higher among manual workers, those who have left-wing economic views and moral-progressive values. Strikingly, East-Asian-Dutch and Latin-American-Dutch (other than Surinamese-Dutch) hardly express a propensity to vote the ethnic-minority-interest parties.