Pathways to Power: The Political Representation of Citizens of Immigrant Origin in Seven European Democracies
Education Systems and Educational Institutions
Final Report Abstract
PATHWAYS collected and analyzed data on the descriptive and substantive representation of citizens of immigrant origin in the national and (a sample of) regional legislatures of Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom for a window of observation from approximately 1990 till approximately 2015. First descriptive statistics demonstrate considerable variation in the presence of legislators of immigrant origin in the eight national legislatures despite similar levels of immigration in the past decades. The share of the foreign-born population (‘first-generation immigrants’) in these countries (irrespective of citizenship) ranged from 8.1% in Italy to 13.8% in Belgium, with Italy being the only of the eight countries with a share of less than 11.2% during our window of observation. The share of legislators of immigrant origin, by contrast, is low in relation to the population of immigrant-origin residents. In the most recent complete legislative term covered by PATHWAYS, the presence of such legislators (including the first and second generation) reached the level at least of the first-generation immigrants only in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom (11.1% in both cases). In all other countries studied, the share of legislators of immigrant origin of the first and second generation was significantly lower ranging from 1.0% in Spain (in the 2011-2015 legislative period) to 7.7% in Belgium (in the 2010-2014 legislative period). What explains cross-national differences despite similar levels of immigration? The comparative analyses demonstrated that there is no mono-causal explanation except for the later onset of net immigration to Southern European countries which turned from typical origins of migration to significant recipients of immigration only during the 1980s. One of the key findings is that, the large number of biographies analyzed notwithstanding, many sources of variation in representativeness are country-specific. Access to citizenship is one example: in the United Kingdom, immigrants from Commonwealth countries had full citizenship rights almost on arrival. Other former colonial countries also facilitated the route to citizenship, whereas countries such as Germany distinguished carefully between immigrants with German ancestry and those without. As a result of such country-specific factors, we decided to begin the first edited project volume with a series of country studies contextualizing the data we collected for the period from 1990. Despite such national differences, there are some general trends in in all countries: For example, the social selectivity of elite recruitment is a major barrier for the proportional selection and election of citizens of immigrant for public office in national and regional legislatures. We could also show that properties of the electoral system interact in interesting (yet plausible) ways with the socio-demographic composition of electoral districts. The size of the foreign-born population in a district, for example, has a systematic positive effect on the election of representatives of immigrant origin, where the district magnitude is large but has little effect where it is low. Questions of spatial concentration, plus properties of the electoral system and the centralization of candidate selection in the relevant parties are influential variables. Immigrant origin also matters for legislative behaviour and substantive representation. We found, for example, that legislators of immigrant origin generally are more active in tabling written questions than their colleagues even after holding a large number of relevant controls constant, e.g., seniority, party family, opposition status, etc.). They are also more likely to table questions relating to the concerns of immigrants. In short, the descriptive representation of citizens of immigrant origin does matter for their substantive representation, at least in the legislatures we studied.
Publications
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2015. ‘Mobility and Representation: Legislators of Non-European Origin in the British House of Commons, 2001-2015.’ Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte, 16, 83–109
Geese, Lucas, Goldbach, Wolfgang, and Saalfeld, Thomas
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2017. Content Reconstruction of Parliamentary Questions through a Combination of Meta-data with an OCR Process. In: Science Conference Proceedings. University of Zilina, 107-112
Fitsilis, Fotis, Saalfeld, Thomas, and Schwemmer, Carsten
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2017. ‘Election proximity and representation focus in party-constrained environments.’ Party Politics
Fernandes, Jorge M., Leston-Bandeira, Cristina, and Schwemmer, Carsten
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2018. ‘Analyzing the Representation of Citizens of Immigrant Origin in Eight Contemporary European Democracies.’ In: Migration and Citizenship: Newsletter of the American Political Science Association’s Organized Section on Migration and Citizenship, Vol. 6, No. 1, Seiten 35-43
Geese, Lucas, Saalfeld, Thomas
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2018. ‘Do immigrant-origin candidates attract immigrant-origin voters in partycentred electoral systems? Evidence from Germany.’ Acta Politica
Geese, Lucas
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2018. ‘The impact of candidate selection rules and electoral vulnerability on legislative behaviour in comparative perspective.’ European Journal of Political Research
Fernandes, Jorge M., Geese, Lucas, and Schwemmer, Carsten
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2018. ‘The more concentrated, the better represented? The geographical concentration of immigrants and their descriptive representation in the German mixed-member system.’ International Political Science Review
Geese, Lucas, Schacht, Diana
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2019 ‘MPs’ Principals and the Substantive Representation of Disadvantaged Immigrant Groups.’ West European Politics
Geese, Lucas, Schwemmer, Carsten
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2019. ‘Immigration-related Speechmaking in a Party-constrained Parliament: Evidence from the 'Refugee Crisis' of the 18th German Bundestag (2013-2017).’ German Politics
Geese, Lucas
