Saturday, March 15, 2014
Private Dining Room (Omni Shoreham)
The paper builds on earlier work on intersectionality and the substantive representation of migrant women in Germany which found that the double advantage of gender and migrant status led female representatives with a migrant background to behave different from male legislators with a similar background. This paper builds on these findings to examine to what extent migrant women in positions of political authority are able to shape the immigration discourse in Germany. Are migrant women trying to change the dominant discourse with regard to immigrant integration and in what ways? The paper uses process tracing to examine how debates about integration policy unfolded at the national level after 2005, specifically with regard to the role of women, and the role of gender in integration. It examines how migrant women participated in the framing of the debate, how they positioned themselves relative to other actors, and the extent to which the institutional context contributed to their ability to shape policy.
