Intersectional Representation: How Do the Media Portray Identities of Dutch MPs?

Citizens with a migration background have increasingly gained access to politics reflected in the gradually rising levels of descriptive immigrant representation. At the same time immigrants from ‘non-western’ countries have become highly politicized over de past decades in European societies, as evidenced by the rise of anti-immigrant parties and the prominence of the issue of immigration on the media agenda. While a lot of scholarly attention has gone to the media coverage of immigration and immigrants in European societies, we know very little about how the media portrays Members of Parliament (MPs) with a migration background. On top of that, we do not know how - with an intersectional lens – background, gender, as well as other identity descriptors play out together. This is an important omission, as the media reflect and form norms of what it means to be a politician and studying them can thus shed light on mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. In this paper, we measure how Dutch MPs are described in five Dutch newspapers by means of a content analysis over a period of 18 years (1994-2012), applied to a corpus of 250,000 Dutch newspaper articles. We account for the background of the MPs by matching the MPs with a migration background to the best and second best matching non-migrant MP (e.g. of the same party, time period, etc.). The study thus provides intersectional insight into the media representation of Dutch members of parliament. These mechanisms of power define the distance from the political norm and impacts on who is legitimized and who is othered in politics. We find that female MPs, both with and without a migration background, are othered much more than men; they are described by media in ways that emphasize their distance from the norm-politician. Male MPs with a migration background are considered closer to the norm of ‘what a politician looks like’.