Regulating Diversity in Political Parties: From Tokens to Leaders

Ethnic minorities with a migration background are an emerging political force in West-European immigration countries. How do political parties respond to diversity and how can differences between parties and across time be explained? This paper studies how political parties in the Netherlands have dealt with diversity since 1986 when the first ethnic minority MP was elected. Drawing on interviews with party elites and intersectional analyses of election lists and the composition of parliament this paper finds that ideology largely explains the openness or closure for ethnic minorities. This effect is highly gendered, however. Most ethnic minority MPs represent leftist and social-democratic parties; the majority of them are women. Leftist and social democratic parties feature strong feminist women’s sections, which pushed for voluntary gender targets and thereby more openness to women, including ethnic minority women. Institutionalized women’s sections also facilitated intra-party networks of ethnic minority women. These networks in turn have been the driving force behind candidate recruitment, nomination and lobbying for eligible spots. Regardless of their ideology parties have always been reluctant to accommodate a pure ethnic lobby; ethnic politics is too contested. However, ethnicity becomes less politicized in combination with gender and may become a trump card instead. While ethnic minority women in the early 1990s entered parliament as tokens, as a sign of a party’s progressiveness, during the past years ethnic minority women have been placed on top positions of electoral lists. Through the back door they have entered the inner power circles of political parties.