Political Parties and Ethnic Diversity: Understanding Convergences and Divergences Between the Socialist Party (PS) in Paris and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Berlin

This paper asks how political parties respond to ethnic diversity. Based on interviews and archival research in France and Germany, I present three main findings. Against the background of discussions of distinctive French and the German citizenship-integration models, I argue that national conceptions help explain specific party responses to diversity, but also that convergent pressures do result in similar reactions. Furthermore, I argue that the organizational details of party structure, as well as party ideology, must be taken into account in order to get a better understanding of the behavior of both parties. While the differing structures of the two parties lead us to expect divergent responses to immigration and ethnic diversity, ideology is more likely to produce resemblance. Finally, I show that locality matters. Local factors such as city integration politics in the Berlin case, and the absence of a specific integration policy in the Parisian case, help to explain different outcomes. At the same time local similarities like party competition and renewal ambition led to comparable motivations in both parties. Consequently, we should not expect that political parties respond to challenges such as ethnic diversity in either similar or different ways. Taking into account national, local and party internal configurations helps to understand such contingencies.