Black and Asian candidates face an “ethnic penalty” in elections, seeing lower increases in their vote shares than white candidates in the same parties, analysis has revealed.
Conservative party candidates can be particularly disadvantaged, meaning minority ethnic candidates may end up contesting only safe seats, the research found – a phenomenon that could drastically limit the spectrum of candidates who will put themselves forward for the party.
The analysis by Stephen Fisher, an Oxford University professor, found that where the Tories fielded minority ethnic candidates last year in seats where they had not done so in 2015, the party’s share of the vote rose by 1.6 points – significantly lower than the national increase of 5.2 points.
Where white Tory candidates stood in seats where a minority ethnic candidate had stood in 2015, the vote share increased by 6.5 points. Fisher said the analysis implied “an apparent 3.6-point ethnic penalty”.
The voting trend is highlighted in a new book, The British General Election of 2017, edited by professors Philip Cowley and Denis Kavanagh. It is one part of a troubling picture of the electoral prospects for minority ethnic candidates presented by recent academic research and shared with the Guardian as part of the Bias in Britain series.
There is also ongoing concern over the fairness of the main parties’ selection processes. A close ally of Jeremy Corbyn has called for an increase in minority representation on panels to avoid unconscious bias.
Claudia Webbe is a member of Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) and one of three co-authors of the party’s democracy review, which set out a policy of backing a change in the law to allow all-minority shortlists, which are not permitted under current legislation.
Webbe told the Guardian: “We need legislative change, but we also have to address the makeup of select panels. If they are all-white, it can be argued that there is unwitting and unconscious bias.
“if you have a selection panel that is all white they are likely to recruit a white candidate. You have to make sure that the processes and the selection panels are equally diverse.”
In tandem with the selection panel issue, another fear is that the so-called ethnic penalty limits the seats for which minority candidates are considered – and means minority candidates will be held to a higher standard than white ones.
New analysis released by Fisher to the Guardian supports these concerns, suggesting parties may be reticent to put forward minority ethnic candidates in marginal seats that are not ethnically diverse.
The Tories added two new minority ethnic MPs in 2017, Bim Afolami in Hitchin and Harpenden and Kemi Badenoch in Saffron Walden, both places where more than 90% of the population is white.
“It does fit a pattern, established most strikingly by [David] Cameron’s modernisation strategy in 2010, of the Conservatives increasing their ethnic minority representation in parliament by fielding ethnic minority candidates in safe seats where they can afford to lose some votes and still win,” Fisher told the Guardian.
He said Labour appeared to be less concerned about voters inflicting an “ethnic penalty” on minority candidates. “They fielded minority candidates in relatively marginal places, some of which were not very diverse,” including Peterborough, Bedford, Warrington South and Battersea.
“This is not something a party would do if they were worried about ethnic electoral penalties,” he said. “That said, it does have to be remembered that when Labour were picking their candidates in 2017, many commentators did not expect them to be able to win any new seats at all.”
Fisher’s analysis found that 37 of the 61 minority ethnic candidates nominated by Labour were put up in ethnically diverse constituencies. And while Labour’s performance was exceptionally good in the most diverse seats, the ethnicity of the candidate made no difference to the share of the vote, the research found.
Patrick English, a lecturer at the University of Exeter, has recently mapped striking regional differences in the opportunities given to non-white British candidates to get elected.
“Elections since 2010 have seen far more minority candidates fielded in winnable contests in London, the south-east and in the West Midlands than in others such as the north-east, the East Midlands, and Wales,” he said. “Therefore, it is clear that in some areas of Britain, opportunities to increase the representation of minority ethnic candidates are far greater than in others.”
Unconscious or implicit bias is one part of the explanation for why, despite equalities being enshrined in law, minority groups are still at a disadvantage in many parts of life. The term was popularised after US social psychologists devised a way of measuring the prejudices that we are not necessarily aware of – the Implicit Association Test. They published a paper in 1998 claiming that their tool for measuring "the unconscious roots of prejudice" showed that 90-95% of people were susceptible.
While the reliability of that test is now contested, there is overwhelming wider evidence that unconscious bias seeps into decisions that affect recruitment, access to healthcare and outcomes in criminal justice in ways that can disadvantage black and minority ethnic people. One study found that university professors were far more likely to respond to emails from students with white-sounding names. Another showed that white people perceived black faces as more threatening than white faces with the same expression.
While some of our biases may begin on an unconscious level, experts caution that the concept of unconscious bias should not absolve people of discriminatory behaviour. “If you’re aware of these associations then you can bring to bear all of your critical skills and intelligence to see it’s wrong to think like that,” says Lasana Harris, a neuroscientist who studies prejudice and social learning at University College London. “We all have the ability to control that.”
Research by Maria Soblewska, of the University of Manchester, suggests minority candidates may also face an “ethnic penalty” at selection meetings. It suggests the record-breaking increase in minority ethnic MPs in 2017 was because the role of local parties was greatly diminished.
The snap election meant both of the main parties were forced to centralise the majority of their candidate selection processes. That intervention may have countered any unconscious bias that could have occurred in routine local selections, where party members are the voters.
Research into the 2015 elections found that minority ethnic candidates on average had to apply for more seats, interview in more seats and contest more shortlists than their white counterparts before they were successfully nominated – findings that are likely to underestimate the scale of the problem, given that only successful candidates were interviewed.
The government has recommended that political parties publish their data on minority ethnic candidates. There is no reliable data on the numbers of black or minority ethnic candidates who are shortlisted but do not win the selection process, so it remains impossible to tell whether candidates are regularly disadvantaged.
Data released from the 2017 election reveals that just under 10% of Labour candidates were black, Asian or from other ethnic minorities, compared with 7% of both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat candidates. In total, 7% of winning Conservative candidates were from ethnic minorities, versus 12% in Labour.
The Lib Dems’ Vince Cable was the first party leader to call for all-minority shortlists. “It’s quite right that there are all-women and all-disabled shortlists. What is wrong is this loophole that effectively bans all-BAME shortlists, particularly given the gross under-representation of people from non-white backgrounds in parliament,” Cable told the Guardian.
“My party does not yet have adequate BAME representation. Certainly having a BAME shortlist would help to get to where we want to be.”
Labour’s democracy review recommended that the party compile a legal case to justify reserving seats for minority ethnic and disabled candidates in multi-member council wards and that it plan for a change in the law to allow all-minority shortlists for parliamentary seats.
But Webbe expressed her frustration at the slow rate of change across all parties. “There’s a clear democratic deficit in parliament and beyond,” she said. “At the current rate of progress it is going to be beyond any of our lifetimes before we will get the kind of parliament that reflects the society we have live in.”
