Australian voters favour darker-skinned indigenous political candidates over all others, and left-wingers have a massive bias against White men and women, new research shows.
The landmark study, published in the Perspectives on Politics journal this month, found that even though right-wing voters rated White candidates much more favourably on competence and warmth than left-wing respondents did, they still ranked them below light-skinned indigenous candidates.
On competence, centrist voters rated dark-skinned indigenous men highest, followed by dark-skinned indigenous women, light-skinned indigenous women, Chinese women, light-skinned indigenous men, and White women, with Chinese and White men last.
On both metrics, the more right-wing a respondent was the more similarly they tended to rate the candidates, while far-left voters showed the largest disparities in results.
Study authors Josh Holloway of Flinders University, Duncan McDonnell of Griffith University, and Michelle Evans of the University of Melbourne, described the results as “surprising”.
“In Australia, where studies have shown that indigenous people are more discriminated against than Whites and Asian Australians, we expected our study to reveal a hierarchy reflecting this experience,” they wrote.
“To our surprise, however, the experimental survey results indicate the opposite.”
“Although our results may reflect a positive ‘violation of expectations’, with respondents ‘rewarding’ people from a highly marginalised community for having achieved a position of high status, they nonetheless call into question scholars’ and party elites’ assumptions regarding public bias.”
The poll asked 4,000 Australian adults to assess the personality traits of eight hypothetical prospective candidates with identical biographies but from White, Chinese, and both dark-skinned and light-skinned indigenous backgrounds.
Because previous studies have shown that competence and warmth influence public support for candidates and politicians and also reflect racial hierarchies, the study authors expected White candidates to be seen as most competent and warm, followed by Chinese, light-skinned indigenous, and dark-skinned indigenous.
They also expected to find that the more right-wing a respondent was, the more poorly they would rate indigenous candidates on both warmth and competence, due to studies showing that “right-wing ideology predicts a considerable increase of out-group hostility in the case of ethnic prejudices”.
“We uncovered the contrary: an inverted hierarchy in which darker-skinned indigenous aspirant candidates fared better than all others,” the authors wrote.
“Public bias toward indigenous prospective candidates thus does exist, but, in our study, it favours, rather than penalises, them.”
The authors wrote that the findings could be explained by a positive “violation of expectations”, when a person with unexpectedly positive characteristics is evaluated more favourably than a person with equally positive but expected ones.
Alternatively, the findings may be a result of the indigenous candidates being “considered competent and warm compared to respondents’ perceptions of other indigenous people, and hence the opinions expressed are still underpinned by prejudice”, the authors wrote.
The authors said they hoped the findings would “encourage party officials and power brokers to put aside considerations stemming from strategic discrimination and not to presume that indigenous candidates will be met with negative voter evaluations, particularly from the majority White population”.
“As our study has shown, if parties in Australia put forward indigenous candidates from professional backgrounds, they will have a good chance of being positively evaluated by the public,” they wrote.
“Although doing so would exacerbate the socioeconomic unrepresentativeness of parliamentary institutions, at the same time it would lead to greater representation of indigenous people and contribute to a less racially hierarchical democracy.”
Header image: The dark-skinned indigenous and White candidates used in the study (Perspectives on Politics , First View , pp. 1 – 20 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592725102107).
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