Ethnic Minority Women’s Interests in Dutch Parliament
Liza Mügge (presenting author) Laure Michon & Silvia Erzeel
The past decade ethnic minority women moved from the margin to the center of political attention. On the one hand, this attention was triggered by feminists demonstrating that political processes are not only influenced by gender or ethnicity, but rather by the intersectionalities between the two. On the other hand, European populist and conservative political parties are increasingly paying attention to ethnic minority women, often as part of a nationalist or anti-immigrant agenda. A variety of political actors are making ‘representative claims’ about ethnic minority women, and this observation heightens the importance for scholars to study these ‘claims to represent’.
This paper asks: who, puts ethnic minority women’s issues on the parliamentary agenda and how did this change over time? Drawing on the Netherlands it analyses which parliamentarians – in terms of gender, ethnicity and party affiliation - have tabled parliamentary questions relating to the fate of ethnic minority women and examines their content and framing from 1995-2012. Our analysis reveals several shifts over time since the first question was tabled in 2000. Until 2006 most petitioners were leftwing majority women; since 2006 rightist majority men and leftwing ethnic minority women have been dominant in debates concerning ethnic minority women. Leftist petitioners tend to be in favor of accommodating group rights and address specific problems without negative reference to religion and culture. Rightist petitioners point to religion and culture – often combined as ‘Islamic culture’ – as the main problem. Our findings increase our theoretical understanding of the relation between descriptive (numerical presence of an identity group) and substantive political representation (interests of identity groups) through an intersectional lens.
