Immigrant Constituencies

Next to the role that the political context and institutions play (as shown above) some key characteristics of immigrant groups are decisive for immigrants’

descriptive representation. First, the geographic distribution of immigrants across the constituencies influences the representation of immigrants in parliament.

Geographic concentration within the borders of a constituency makes the immigrant community more visible (Bird 2003). And therefore it can influence the strategies followed by parties to mobilize these immigrant voters as a bloc (Bird 2005). US-based empirical evidence shows that immigrants’ concentration in some specific electoral districts develops new political scenarios in which parties and candidates must address the immigrant voters in order to win (DeSipio and de la Garza 2005:398).

58 With the available data I have been able to examine only the candidates of immigrant origin that have been elected. A future study should include as well all the nominated candidates as to observe how immigrant candidates are distributed across safe, contested and lost seats.

Second, in terms of immigrant voters’ mobilization, geographic concentration can increase immigrants’ political participation, especially when immigrant candidates run for office. Empirical evidence has shown that immigrant voters register lower electoral turnout in comparison with native voters (see Chapter 3). Generally speaking socio-economic disparities translate into disparities in political resources and participation (Verba, Nie and Kim 1978; Verba, Schlozman and Brady 1995, Bartels 2009). As a result, poor citizens participate less in politics than wealthy citizens do (Bartels 2009), and as immigrants are in their majority workers (see Chapter 2) they also tend to participate less in elections. In addition, immigrant voters have reduced language skills and political knowledge, and usually have been excluded from political participation for some time before they naturalized generating some apathy among them, which also explains their lower turnout.

Nevertheless, the effects of socio-economic status and group-specific characteristics on turnout seem to decrease when immigrant candidates run for office. Empirical evidence demonstrates that in the US urban Latino voters registering high levels of unemployment and living in constituencies with large shares of immigrant show high level of electoral participation (De la Garza and DeSipio 2005).

The evidence exposed above suggests that immigrants’ geographic concentration within the borders of electoral districts favors immigrants’ descriptive representation (Kostadinova 2007, Bird 2003, Togeby 2008). In constituencies where immigrant voters are visible, parties may be more likely to nominate candidates of immigrant origin. When immigrant candidates are nominated immigrant voters are more likely to turnout to vote and support the candidate (Barreto et al. 2004). From this perspective, who the leader is can be relevant for voters’ choice because candidates’ personal characteristics can provide necessary information on how they would behave with respect to unforeseen problems (Aarts et al. 2011:3). Also voters can make the assumption that immigrant representatives have a better understanding of the main concerns in these

constituencies (Mansbridge 1999), especially regarding immigration and integration.

All in all the arguments expressed above point to the assumption that group representation improves when groups are both, large and concentrated. Based on this the next hypothesis that will be examined in this Chapter is formulated as follows:

Hypothesis 8: Geographic Concentration

Large shares of immigrants in a constituency are related to immigrants’ descriptive representation in national parliaments.

To finalize, I have presented the three working hypothesis that give the structure of the study presented in this Chapter. Below I will summarize the main steps that have been made in the design of the study, and explain how I measure descriptive representation.

5.2 Research Design and Measurement

5.2.1 Case Selection

The objective of this chapter is to contribute to our understanding of immigrants’

descriptive representation in European democracies. As explained earlier, given that the analysis of political representation required great efforts in terms of data collection and coding only three cases are being examined with great depth here.

Precisely, this study focuses on three cases: France (2007 2012), Germany (2005 -2009), and the United Kingdom (2005- 2010). The comparative method is used here to be able to establish more general empirical implications of the findings (Mill 1843, Lijphart 1971). The small N strategy adopted here has been designed

to provide with a deep understanding of the factors that influence immigrants’

descriptive representation.

The selection of the three cases examined here has been inspired some baseline characteristics that these countries share in common (Przeworski and Teune 1970). The three countries rank among the most developed countries in Europe and in the world. These favorable economic conditions influence international migration cycles. As a result, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are in the continent among the countries counting more immigrants among their national populations. Even when peaks of mass immigration have been observed in other countries (like Ireland) the arrival and settlement of immigrants in these three countries have been relatively stable in the last decades resulting in the fact that these three count among the countries with the largest first and second generation immigrant populations.

Second, I focus on countries having similar political traits. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom have had stable democracies in the last half a century. This guarantees certain stability in their party systems and election cycles. Democratic stability is related to the resolution of classic social cleavages in the sense of Stein and Rokkan (1967) giving room to the emergence of new issues such as immigration and the environment (Kreisi et al. 2008). Besides, early membership to the European Union makes these countries important agenda-setters in the region, and therefore they play an important role setting the agenda on immigration. Finally, the three cases have implemented some sort of single-member constituency system. France has a two-round system, Germany combines it with proportional representation, and the United Kingdom uses the first-past-the-post system. Single-member constituency systems are relevant because they incentive parties to nominate immigrant candidates in immigrants with large shares of immigrants.

5.2.2 Data

For this study, I have created an original dataset including demographic and biographical data about the members of national parliaments. Data on the background of national deputies has been gathered by the project Migrants as Political Actors⁵⁹, and extracted from parliamentary and personal websites.

Education, gender, and political career data has been gathered using MPs’ official and personal websites, as well as other secondary online sources. Furthermore, immigrant population data was gathered from the websites of the national statistics organizations of the respective countries. Finally, for measuring parties’

ideology I use the Chapel Hill Expert Survey 2010 (CHES) (Hooghe et al. 2010).

Examining the composition of national assemblies raises questions about social categories, in particular when these are related to peoples’ race and ethnicity. As Fearon (2003) states it, the notion of ethnic group is complex as it is drawing the lines of an ethnic group. Yet, generally speaking, ethnic groups have the following characteristics: (1) membership in the group is reckoned by descendant, by both, members and non-members, (2) members are conscious of group membership, (3) members share some common cultural features such as language, religion and customs, (4) the group has a homeland, (5) the group has a shared history as a group and (6) it stands on its own as a group (Fearon 2003: 201).

In this chapter I follow one of the most used strategies in social research dealing with immigration. I categorize elected representatives by their birthplace or by the birthplace of their parents. One of the main advantages of this approach is that this strategy allows doing cross-country and longitudinal analyses (see Bloemraad 2013). Following this strategy, I have identified first and second-generation

59 Coordinated by Andreas Wüst: http://www.migrantactors.net/

immigrants elected members of parliament based on their place of birth and nationality at birth⁶⁰.

As Table 14 shows, the number of immigrant deputies is very small in the three countries. In France, out of 577 national deputies only 18 have been of immigrant origin in the 2007 Legislature. Of the three countries here examined, Germany has the smaller number of representatives with migratory background. In the 2005 general election only 12 of the 614 deputies elected were of a different ethnicity than German. Finally, the United Kingdom registers the higher number of immigrant deputies of the three countries. 21 of the 646 elected deputies in the British general election were of first and second-generation migrants.

Table 14.Number of Deputies and Immigrant Deputies

Country Total Deputies Immigrant Deputies

France 577 18

Germany 614 12

United Kingdom 646 21

As it can be seen, the number of immigrant representatives remains relatively low across democracies. In the next sections of this Chapter I will discuss some aspects related to the measurement of descriptive representation, and then examine what factors affect immigrants’ representation.

60 I have made use of all accessible methods to identify immigrant members of national parliaments. Yet, given the nature of the data that is required in this inquires it is possible that some immigrant representatives remain unidentified.