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The political representation of ethnic minorities in the Netherlands: ethnic minority candidates and the role of party characteristics

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Abstract

This article examines the extent to which political parties affect the descriptive representation of both Western and non-Western ethnic minority groups on the candidate lists of political parties in the Netherlands. It systematically tests the role of policy positions of Dutch parties, their ethnic minority support, and candidate selection methods. As list position is related to electoral success, we study the nomination of ethnic minority candidates as well as their position on the candidate list. Using ethnic background data of all candidates for the Dutch parliamentary elections in 2012, we find that minorities of Turkish and Moroccan origin are not underrepresented, and that descriptive representation is below parity for Western minorities. We observe neither effect from parties’ ethnic support on ethnic representation, nor do we find any relation between party selection procedure and ethnic minority representation. The position of parties on immigration issues, however, is shown to be important. The results indicate that parties with more restrictive positions on integration and migration not only nominate fewer ethnic minority candidates, they also place non-Western ethnic minority candidates in lower list positions than parties who are less restrictive towards migration and integration.

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Notes

  1. The official publication of the candidate lists for the Dutch parliamentary elections of 2012 was used to get an overview of the candidates (https://zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/stcrt-2012-16691.html).

  2. We asked the candidates four questions: ‘What is your date of birth?’, ‘Which country were you born in?’, ‘In which country was your father born?’, and ‘In which country was your mother born?’

  3. In 95% of the cases the same country of birth of the candidate was coded. The candidates’ father’s country of birth matched in 92% of the cases and the country of birth of the mother in 90% of the cases. When the three coders did not code the same country of birth, the most mentioned country of birth was chosen.

  4. The government collapsed on the 21st of April 2012. The elections took place on the 21st of September and parties could submit candidate lists for these elections to the Electoral Council (Kiesraad) until the 31st of July 2012.

  5. Because the Dutch system is very proportional, this is likely to give a good indication of the expected number of seats each party could win.

  6. As a robustness check the analyses were also run without the candidates of whom information about the year of birth is missing, this did not change the outcome of the hypotheses tests.

  7. When ethnic minorities are part of the party board—the most influential people within the party—this could also affect ethnic minority representation on candidate lists. Therefore, we looked into ethnic representation in party boards but found little variation in 2012. Only in two parties (PvdA and CDA) an ethnic minority member was part of the party board.

  8. Additional robustness checks are presented in the Supplementary Material.

  9. The different party characteristics are likely to be related: whether a balanced candidate list is strived for is likely to depend on parties’ standpoints, especially in the case of ethnic minority representation. Furthermore, ethnic minority support within parties probably goes along with more positive issue positions on migration and integration. Moreover, we anticipate that in parties with positive views on migration and integration, exclusive selectorates are better able to create a balanced candidate list. However, based on Spearman rank correlations, we decided to only include restrictiveness in all interaction models rather than to include all party characteristics in one model (we found a correlation of − 0.363 between restrictiveness and ethnic minority support and − 0.383 between restrictiveness and inclusiveness; the correlation between ethnic minority support and inclusiveness was − 0.162).

  10. We also examined the effect of party ideology on the relative list position of ethnic minority candidates and on the likelihood to be placed in a safe list position. There is no significant interaction effect for party ideology on the relative list position of ethnic minority candidates, nor on the likelihood to be placed in a safe list position. See Tables S4 and S5 in the supplementary material for more details.

  11. In addition, multilevel models were estimated as a robustness check. Some of the effects do not gain significance once multilevel methods are applied. However, the effect sizes do not change substantially. See Supplementary Material for more details.

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Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank Roos Geurts and Tara Koster for their help with the data collection. An earlier version of this article was presented at the ECPR Joint Sessions in Pisa (2016).

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (Grant Number 618106); and the 15 New Opportunities for Research Funding Agency Cooperation in Europe (NORFACE) partners under the programme Welfare State Futures, project MIFARE.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sociology Department, Radboud University Nijmegen, Thomas van Aquinostraat 6, 6525 GD, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Roos van der Zwan, Marcel Lubbers & Rob Eisinga

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  1. Roos van der Zwan
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Correspondence to Roos van der Zwan.

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van der Zwan, R., Lubbers, M. & Eisinga, R. The political representation of ethnic minorities in the Netherlands: ethnic minority candidates and the role of party characteristics. Acta Polit 54, 245–267 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-018-0085-1

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