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AbstractImmigrants and other minorities are underrepresented in politics in most Western democracies. We argue that strategically acting party gatekeepers who update their nomination strategies based on voter behavior contribute to this representation gap. Drawing on unique panel data from Swiss local elections, we find that candidates with a "foreign‐sounding" name systematically receive not only fewer votes but are also fielded on less promising list positions compared to native candidates. We track candidates across elections and show that this inequality is driven by voter discrimination in previous elections. Our study carries relevance for research on minority candidates by linking different stages in the electoral process and showing how parties indirectly discriminate due to their use of candidate‐performance information. It also bears practical implications, pointing to avenues how parties can break the cycle of discrimination in the electoral process.

Abstract
Measures of affective polarization—that is, dislike and hostility across party lines—have been developed and validated in the context of America's two-party system. Yet increasingly, affective polarization is examined comparatively. We address this issue by introducing a novel dataset that measures aspects of partisan affect in 10 countries with diverse party systems. We detect associations between partisan affect toward out-parties versus affect toward out-parties' supporters, but their strength varies across countries. We discuss measurement reasons for this variation and consider the implications of our findings for the emerging comparative affective polarization literature.

Can wars breed nationalism? We argue that civilians' indirect exposure to war fatalities can trigger psychological processes that increase identification with their nation and ultimately strengthen support for nationalist parties. We test this argument in the context of the rise of the Nazi Party after World War 1 (WW1). To measure localized war exposure, we machine-coded information on 7.5 million German soldiers who were wounded or died in WW1. Our empirical strategy leverages battlefield dynamics that cause plausibly exogenous variation in the county-level casualty fatality rate—the share of dead soldiers among all casualties. We find that throughout the interwar period, electoral support for right-wing nationalist parties, including the Nazi Party, was 2.6 percentage points higher in counties with above-median casualty fatality rates. Consistent with our proposed mechanism, we find that this effect was driven by civilians rather than veterans and areas with a preexisting tradition of collective war commemoration.