Intersectional assessments of female Muslim politicians and the limits of interacting experimental conditions

Many party selectors and voters alike want politics to be more diverse, but fear the electoral consequences of including more Muslims, women and ethnoracially minoritized politicians. The literature mainly approaches this from a unitary perspective, focusing on either female or black politicians. Do (intersections of) politician religion, gender, and ethnorace influence how voters assess them? I ran survey experiments amongst 3056 respondents in France, Germany, and The Netherlands and presented 18,336 randomly constructed profiles of hypothetical politicians varying their religion, gender, and ethnorace. Voters have a strong negative bias against Muslim politicians. When being a Muslim woman is significantly different from both non-religious women and Muslim men, I consider this to be an intersectional effect. However, I find no such outcomes. Voters do not assess female Muslim politicians significantly differently than their male counterparts. These conclusions have implications for researchers studying intersectionality quantitatively and researchers concerned with the electoral consequences of diversity in politics.