Networked Representation: Understanding the Processes of Political Advocacy for Refugees in the UK Parliament

Refugees and asylum seekers have an acute need to access the protections of the state with their basic rights such as shelter, work and the right to remain all subject to the whim of the government of the day. However, being one of the most politically marginalised forms of migrant groups makes it important to understand where the support for refugee rights is coming from within the UK parliament. There has been significantly less attention on where refugees are sufficiently represented in parliament and how and how a process of representation has developed in Westminster. By asking how the process of representation occurs, this paper makes an empirical contribution to the understanding of the representation of non-voting groups, in particular refugees. This paper seeks to highlight how the structures of parliamentary networks can be used to make a more positive contribution to the political discourse surrounding refugees despite the hostile and exclusionary practices of the state. As this paper is interested in the means by which representation is achieved in the UK Parliament. The primary contribution of this research is to conceptualise parliamentary representation as a network. I argue that conceptualising the representation process as a network allows the more accurate measurement of representation and gets to the heart of how representative processes in the UK parliament actually work. My primary research aim is to understand how the representation network structures, the ways in which individuals are tied via relationships and institutional features, work to produce the representation of refugees in the UK Parliament. These network structures will highlight the positionality an MP holds within a network (Borgatti et al., 2018; Smith and Newman, 2023) and impact their representative behaviour. This paper argues that studying MPs as isolated representative actors leads to a failure in understanding how representation works in practice in the UK Parliament. This paper has developed a model of three parliamentary representative networks. The analysis is conducted in two parts, the first is qualitative interview data with MPs, parliamentary officials and refugee NGOs. This triangulate ideas of how Refugee NGOs understand their relationship to formal parliamentary representation, MPs' conceptualisations of what it means to represent and how they perform this process, and how staff understand the structural institutional features that shape these representation processes and therefore networks. It then tests these networks through a quantitative time-series approach to social network analysis. This account has emphasised the importance of three forms of parliamentary networks, institutional actor networks, relationship and knowledge networks, for the shaping process of representation and highlights how these three closely related networks intersect in order to produce representation for refugees in the UK parliament. By using social network theories as a lens through which the process of representation is analysed this approach emphasises the role of MPs as actors who are socialised to produce representation in ways shaped by other actors in the network and the institutions around them.