Political Representation of Citizens with a Migration Background : Collective Expectations and Assessments

Democracy depends on the ability of all citizens to take part in the political process. However, citizens with a migration background often experience misrepresentation and exclusion from parliamentary politics. This paper forefronts their experiences by asking how disadvantaged citizens’ expectations and assessments of political representation can be fruitfully studied. We argue that existing literature suffers from three limitations. Firstly, it often bypasses the ways in which citizens themselves understand their migration background. This leads to top-down comprehensions of what the political group in need of representation is, while citizens’ own assessments of group representation frequently remain absent. Secondly, we show how an intersectional perspective unpacks group homogeneity, as citizens with a migration background are differently situated along multiple axes of difference, resulting in varying expectations and assessments of group representation. Third, we argue that adding up individual bodies to obtain a sum of shared interests bypasses an investigation of the mechanisms through which similarly situated people define group interests. Drawing inspiration from social movement scholars, we argue that individuals do not necessarily develop awareness of shared fate or joint courses of action towards the problems they face. We understand social group expectations and assessments as collective products, which similarly situated individuals articulate through interaction. Given the social nature of the formation of group interests, we question the individual as appropriate unit of analysis to study disadvantaged citizens’ assessments of political representation. We propose that political science scholars could turn their attention to situations in which social interaction between people who share a similar social location actually takes place, such as in social movements, independent advocacy groups, minority factions of political parties and other spaces where disadvantaged groups autonomously organize. We propose a methodological toolkit, including focus group interviews, social media research and political ethnography.