Intersectional Repertoires of Coping with Political Violence: German Members of Parliament with a Migration Background

Violence is an integral part of the lives of many politicians around the world and poses a major threat to democracies. Violence may take a variety of forms, like death- and rape threats, physical intimidation or micro aggressions. Inspired by the literature on Violence Against Women in Politics we ask: what are the experiences of German Members of the Bundestag (MPs) with a migration background with political violence? Are they based on their ideas, presence or both? How do they cope with various forms of violence? Building on a combination of insights from the study of political representation, intersectionality studies and sociology we develop a theoretical framework: intersectional repertoire of coping with political violence. The framework includes intersectional ascribed identities, experiences and coping. We study members of the German Bundestag with a ‘statistical’ migration background. ‘Migration background’ is a statistical category used by the German census and refers to anybody who is born outside of Germany to non-German citizens or who has at least one parent who is not born in Germany (to German citizens). Since this broad category is racialized in reality, we distinguish between visible and invisible migration background. Citizens with an invisible migration background pass as native Germans. While they can choose to activate this ascribed identity, citizens with a visible migration background cannot stripe of their difference. They are recognizable because of visible characteristics, like skin colour, appearance or a non-German name. Public or political references to migration background refer to those with a visible migration background. It is this group that is most targeted by racism and discrimination. This distinction is relevant for a study on political violence since we expect that the visibility of a migration background influences the types of experiences with violence, as well as how they deal with this. The empirical body draws on the analysis of around fifteen interviews conducted between 2021 and 2023 with MPs who were in office between 2005 and 2022. For the analysis we divided the sample into men and women MPs with an invisible or visible migration background.’ The preliminary data demonstrates that repertoires of coping with experiences of political violence are clearly intersectional. While all interviewees experience violence, particularly women MPs with a visible migration background are limited in their political and private movement by presence based violence. While invisible migration background men MPs have a more ad hoc style of coping, visible migration background MPs develop structural coping strategies that allow them to keep going. Strategies seem to be highly gendered. While the men interviewees respond almost indifferent, describing the perpetrators as just crazy people and ridiculing them. Men also rely more easily than women on outsourcing safety work to their staff and to institutional support, like the parliamentary police. Women are more involved in doing safety work as well as care work for themselves and for their personal and professional bystanders.