The Diminishing Value of Minority Representation: Between Group Representation and Individual Career Paths

Does enhanced descriptive representation lead to substantive representation? Legislators that share descriptive features with underrepresented groups do not necessarily represent their group interests. Instead, members of parliament strategically choose when to engage with the policy topic of underrepresented groups. MPs represent their respective group at the beginning of their career because it confers credibility when they have no legislative track record and few opportunities to demonstrate expertise. Subsequently these group specific efforts are replaced by other legislative activities in later career stages. We apply this theoretical expectation across four underrepresented groups – women, migrants, low social class, and young – and offer a broad perspective on minority representation. Our sample consists of a data base that combines biographical information on German MPs with topic coded parliamentary questions for the time between 1998 and 2013. We demonstrate the diminishing value of minority representation across different types of underrepresented MPs in our empirical analysis.