Descriptive representation

As I have already explained in the introduction, all the claims I analysed were made by MPs from minority backgrounds. Interestingly, my findings demonstrate that descriptive representation was mostly performed by MPs elected on minority parties’ lists. MPs elected on the lists of majority parties rarely evoked their ethnicity as a resource for making claims about minorities. This finding challenges the existing literature, which treats all representatives from minority backgrounds as descriptive representatives as a matter of fact.

MPs from minority parties performed descriptive representation by evoking authenticity as a resource in claim-making. Minority MPs in Serbia framed authenticity as being one with the group and having an unmediated relationship with the group (cf. Saward, 2009):

National communities have the right to be represented by their authentic representatives, i.e. political parties of national minorities; maybe some vote for other parties, but those who vote for these parties have the right to have their representatives here who really advocate for their interests (Elvira Kovács, PT, 07.06.2011).

In such claims, MPs portray themselves as a mere expression of pre-constituted identities and interests. They make up for the absent presence of the minority. They give voice to the voiceless and summon their presence to the political stage. But in this they acknowledge no gap between the absent people and their action in representing them. Theirs is a presentation rather than a re-presentation. They invoke a direct, unmediated relation to their constituency, which confers full presence on the latter.

The sense of authenticity of MPs from minority parties is additionally strengthened by discursive construction of the representatives from majority parties as “Others” and hence of themselves as monopolistic community leaders. In the following response to a claim by a majority party’s MP that representatives from minority backgrounds in majority parties are also authentic representatives of their groups, the Albanian party representative argues:

The story we have just heard about equality between MPs - those elected through central parties and those elected through parties of national minorities. They are equal as MPs but you can see empirically – when and how often these MPs, affiliated with a central party, stand on the floor to defend the interests of minorities, and after all, what is the situation in society, how integrated and included in social and political life minorities are (Riza Halimi, PT, 07.06.2011).

The claim suggests that although MPs from minority and majority parties can be equal as MPs, or in their standing before parliament, they cannot be equal as minority representatives, or in

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their standing before their communities. They have different links and share differently in the destiny of their communities: while MPs from mainstream parties are integrated into the majority, their ethnic groups are excluded and marginalised from the society as a whole.

Interestingly, however, MPs’ conception of authenticity does not exclude a need for accountability. On the contrary, their claims to authenticity rely on proximity, or a direct electoral link with minority voters (cf. Saward, 2009):

It is a direct responsibility. We mentioned accountability, that someone elected you primarily because of that. In the [parliamentary] term we talk about, you were elected on a minority list, and by definition you told these people who elected you that you stand for this and that (Džudžo, Interview, 2014).

Through such claims, MPs invoke their authorisation as representatives as a resource to legitimate their authority to speak about and for minority groups. Their authenticity is not tainted by elections and parties because minority parties are portrayed as true personifications of group identity and interests. The term is used here in a different sense than the one emphasised by Saward. Saward argues that the strength of electoral claims comes from the value of authorisation, while the claims by non-elective representatives rely on authenticity (Saward, 2009, p. 21). Authenticity refers to the extent to which claims are “untainted”, that is, independent of the electoral pressures, participation in government or state institutions and procedures (Saward, 2009, pp. 19–20). In contrast, MPs from minority parties in Serbia claim that the source of their authenticity comes precisely from affiliation with a minority party and electoral authorisation by minority voters.

On the other hand, MPs from majority parties are denied the right to such a claim because they have to compromise their position and their relationship with minorities once they join majority parties. Since political parties nominate candidates for MPs and voters vote for the electoral list as a whole, representatives of majority parties do not have a clear idea of who their constituents are. The electoral system in Serbia, with a single nation-wide electoral district, reinforces a fluid rather than bounded perception of constituency. Representatives, then, subscribe to the role of party delegates, actively constructing political parties as mediators between representatives and voters. This is not the case for MPs from minority parties because, regardless of the electoral system, which allows everyone to vote for either a minority or majority party, a minority party is voted exclusively by members of the minority group it claims to represent (Kovács, Interview, 2014):

I am here because I have 17 thousand votes of Albanians from Preševo, Bujanovac, Medvedja and some from Belgrade and other centres where Albanians live... Absolutely for no other reason, what I have just said, I said as their legitimate representative (Riza Halimi, PT, 23.12.2008).

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Being elected on a minority list makes their demos transparent and hence their relationship with the constituency more direct:

You bear responsibility by the mere fact that you are elected directly. When you go out on the street, a market, a bar or anywhere else, someone will ask you whether he voted for you to speak about citizen’s rights, general issues, the economy or whether I voted for you to fight for my rights (Džudžo, Interview, 2014).

Most of the MPs from majority parties also perceive themselves as less authentic than MPs from minority parties. As one of the MPs argued, they cannot be “more Catholic than the Pope” (Lodi, Interview, 2014). Only a few of them occasionally evoked their ethnic background as a resource for making claims about minorities. At the same time, most of them claimed that ethnicity is not something given and refused to be seen primarily as members of ethnic groups. Hence, while they evoked their ethnicity as an objective category when it suited their goals, for other purposes they challenged the objectiveness of ethnic identifications and groupings based on ethnicity. It may be concluded that compared to minority party MPs, who occupied a stable position as descriptive representatives (i.e. “shape-accordance” representation), MPs from majority parties shifted their positions more actively (Saward, 2014, 728-729).

MPs from majority parties constructed themselves as descriptive representatives in plenary speeches in order to gain legitimacy for their claims about minorities as integrated in society13:

As an MP, a citizen of the state of Serbia and a member of the Ruthenian national community that has lived with other communities on this territory for more than 260 years, I want to express my extreme personal satisfaction for participating in passing the most important law that regulates the position of members of national minorities (Djura Mučenski, PT, 21.07.2009).

Similarly, minority MPs in majority parties evoked their ethnic background to defend the government’s legislative proposals against the objections of minority parties:

I, as a member of a national minority and a man interested in the rights of national minorities, believe that you should not insist on this amendment, because this is not right. … I want to tell you that I know the laws very well and know exactly what you are asking for, because I am myself a member of national minority, as I have already explained (Jon Magda, PT, 17.03.2010).

He portrayed himself as equal to MPs from minority parties: as someone who can know minority interests because of shared ethnicity. This claim had to be made explicitly and repeated to sound more convincing since his relationship to the minority constituency is not as

13

Since this section focuses on the ways MPs construct themselves as representatives, I will write more about these portrayals of constituency in the following section.

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evident as the one minority parties have. In effect, in the dynamics of competitive party politics, this relationship can often feel under assault.

In contrast, in interviews where I was the only audience, majority parties’ MPs either claimed that their ethnicity is a private matter, not relevant for the performance of politics or denied their attachment to a minority identity. Such claims also permeated the plenary speeches but in a more implicit way, through speaking about minorities as “them”. These attitudes are respectively reflected in the following claims:

[Minority parties] are mainly conservative, traditionalist parties, which reduce the whole political life to exclusive protection of some traditional values related to a particular national community. They neither want, plan nor have ambitions to function beyond that and thereby extremely limit their political engagement and opportunities for cooperation with other parties … I have never had a minority-based approach. A minority-based approach assumes a narrow position… I mean, do not get me wrong, I was raised in a Hungarian family, my parents are Hungarians. Therefore, I am attached to that culture, those traditions (Popović, Interview, 04.11.2014).

Arguing that her ethnic background does not determine her political behaviour, she also suggests that ethnicity is not a feature that is worthy of representation.

Several other MPs dismissed their ties with minority groups implicitly by identifying themselves with the majority and portraying minorities as Others: “By changing legal conditions, we are all together trying to enable members [of national minorities] to exercise their rights” (Djura Mučenski, PT, 27.04.2010). The quoted representative sees himself as part of the government (“we” are helping “them”). Framing members of national minorities as Others, he is also indirectly implying that he does not need to be enabled, that he is satisfied with his position and rights. He claims that majority parties perform substantive rather than descriptive representation of minorities: they act for minorities, but not as one of them. While substantive representation necessarily involves claims about minority groups – since claims about group interests at the same time construct group identity – it differs from descriptive representation in a the sense that its felicity depends on how successfully representatives portray themselves as those who know and can act for minorities’ true interests, rather than as those who share an ethnic background with the constituency. This, however, does not mean that MPs cannot use descriptive representation as a resource to make claims to know and act for minority interests. They will, and they do.

MPs’ constructions of themselves as different from minorities are additionally captured in other references to minorities or representatives of minorities as “them” or “Others”. The suggestion is that minority party representatives claim an exclusive title to the representation of their constituencies, thus creating a divide – even an enmity – within the

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group, between their minority constituents and the majority party representatives’ minority constituents. For example, when commenting on the Hungarian party SVM, a majority party representative with the same ethnic background argues that “they always fight for their Hungarians” (Žiroš Jankelić, Interview, 2014). Similarly, another Hungarian MP claimed that “we from the ruling parties could do so much more because we had more money and better connections than members of national minorities” (Lodi, Interview, 2014).

Finally, two other MPs went even further by not only denying their ethnic background in a political sense, but also by constructing themselves as Serbs. An MP with a Russian background, for example, argued that he is proud of his Russian origins and respects the traditions, but at the same time he was born in Serbia and in affective terms feels like a Serb:

People who came [to Serbia from Russia] at the time when my family came do not have that kind of connection. They can declare emotionally as this or that, similarly as I could declare myself as Russian, which I do not do because that is not how I feel. But I am proud of my origins and I celebrate Russian holidays, we go to the Russian church, have our tradition, I do not want to bother you with these issues… I am just an interesting example of a complete assimilation (Samofalov, Interview, 2014).

A Muslim MP, on the other hand, argues that Bosniak identity has recently been constructed for political purposes and invites the audience to see them as Muslim Serbs:

My family and I have always declared as Serbs and I feel as a Serb of different religious affiliation. And I do not let anyone be more Serb than I am… There were three constitutive peoples in the old Yugoslavia: Serbs, Croats and Slovenians. As the political situation changed, every group created its national corpus trying to prove in impossible ways that they belong to national minorities, which is not true…I recognise [Bosniaks] as Muslim Serbs. That is how they declared themselves for centuries (Spaho, Interview, 2014).

In conclusion, I have argued in this section that to be a descriptive representative of a group, a representative needs to mobilise her ethnicity and construct herself as someone who belongs to the group. As Pitkin herself at some point noted, what is necessary to make descriptive representation is “the intention to depict” (Pitkin, 1967, p. 67). Making someone present who is not literally present by resemblance, requires the invocation of that resemblance either by a claim maker or the audience. By activating their ethnicity and arguing for its relevance, representatives invite the audience to recognise them as descriptive representatives based on shared ethnicity. This is visible in different claims made by MPs in both minority and majority parties. While MPs from both groups make claims about and for minorities, they do not always necessarily construct themselves as descriptive representatives. It is easier for minority parties to successfully invoke ethnicity as a resource in claims- making since their claims are supported by the institutional and cultural background. The strength of their claim to authenticity lies precisely in the fact that it does not even have to be

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made explicitly. It is believed to be self-evident that one can claim to speak for and about minorities only if one is a member of a minority party and shares ethnic identity with a constituency. In contrast, the relationship of majority parties’ MPs with minority constituencies is neither electoral nor party based so they have to make more explicit effort to convince the audience of their legitimacy to speak about and for minorities based on shared identity. Although this is not necessarily true of all majority party MPs with ethnic minority backgrounds, some of them joined those parties precisely because they either do not feel ethnicity is a relevant feature to represent in parliament or do not feel any particular attachment to a minority group. In such cases, as expected, they did not evoke their legitimacy as based on ethnicity. In contrast to the views that individuals have basic motivations and needs that drive their behaviour, this suggests that representatives have mixed and diverse motivations. These findings further demonstrate that ethnic resemblance is not a sufficient condition for descriptive representation. This further develops a minority line of inquiry, according to which in the representation, identity cannot be treated as unproblematic, static and objective category (Piscopo, 2011, Squires, 2008).