ECPR

Install the app

Install this application on your home screen for quick and easy access when you’re on the go.

Just tap Share then “Add to Home Screen”

Descriptive Representatives as ‘Cultural Brokers’: Challenges and Opportunities for the Representation of Populations Issued form Migration.

Gender
Representation
Candidate
Identity
Eline Severs
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Eline Severs
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Sara De Jong
University of York

Abstract

Since the 1990s, a growing body of literature has been concerned with the substantive representation of historically disadvantaged groups and the potential of members of these groups – so-called, descriptive representatives – to contribute to such representation. When explaining the added value of descriptive representatives, theorists (e.g., Young 1997; Mansbridge 1999; Williams 2000; Dovi 2007) have displayed an important concern for within-group relations and representatives’ capacity to represent a ‘truncated version’ of their group’s interests. Cognisant of group members’ diverging – and potentially conflicting – interests, scholars have defined ‘good’ representatives by reference to their ‘mutual relationships with members of dispossessed subgroups’ (cf. Dovi 2002, 741). Expanding representatives’ normative duties from intra-group relations to inter-group relations, the current paper borrows the notion of ‘cultural brokers’ from cultural anthropology. Research on colonialism has traced the importance of cultural brokers, who functioned as interpreters and mediators of colonial and indigenous interests. Cultural brokers are described as “operators […] ‘between two worlds’, exemplars of 'transculturalisation” (Hosmer 1997: 493), who work “on the fringes of governing institutions as well as within them” (Ibid: 504). In the context of dominant integration discourse that attributes great significance to so-called cultural differences, it can be argued that in comparison to women – who also share a history of marginalisation –, the need for ‘brokering’ is greater for ethnic minority populations. Based on data consisting of interviews with and opinion pieces by members of parliament published in a selection of (broadsheet and tabloid) Flemish and Francophone newspapers (1995-2014), this paper researches how Belgian parliamentarians with a migrant background conceive of their representative roles, the types of people they (should) represent and the (party or other) obstacles they experience in their function. The data is collected for ethnic minority politicians that have been elected in one of the Belgian parliaments (regional and/or federal level).