Walking the Representation Tightrope: Party demands, community expectations and immigrant-origin politicians’ representation goals

This seminar is supported by the ANU Centre for European Studies

This seminar examines ideas of representation in diversifying legislatures. Grounded in in-depth interviews with immigrant-origin politicians across Belgium’s parliaments, I examine “ethnic” MPs’ understandings of their representational and legislative roles. I contend that looking beyond quantitative measures of substantive representation allows us to understand how immigrant-origin MPs navigate tensions between their own career objectives and political party or ethnic community expectations about their representation style. In addition to considering electoral rules and party constraints, I argue that considering temporal dimensions—stages of the electoral cycle and phases of representatives’ political careers—is crucial to understanding “ethnic” MPs’ varying approaches to representation and raises questions about how, and how fully, they can become “normal” (Nergiz, 2014) MPs. 

Fiona Barker is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics at Victoria University of Wellington. Current research projects examine experiences of politicians of migrant or visible minority background in Europe and New Zealand, voting turnout among immigrants to New Zealand, and patterns of female and ethnic representation under MMP. Her monograph, Nationalism, Identity and the Governance of Diversity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), examined sub-state nationalism and migrant integration in the UK, Belgium and Canada. Other recent publications include ‘Multi-level governance of immigration in multinational states’ (in Hepburn and Zapata-Barrero eds. The Politics of Immigration in Multilevel States) and 'Constituting the democratic public: New Zealand’s extension of national voting rights to non-citizens’, NZJPIL 12: 1, 2014. After completing her PhD at Harvard University, she was a Jean Monnet Scholar at the European University Institute, and has been visiting researcher at the WZB Berlin, CERI-Sciences Po Paris, and the University of Edinburgh.

 

ANUCES is an initiative involving six ANU Colleges (Arts and Social Sciences, Law, Business and Economics, Asia and the Pacific and Medicine, Biology and Environment, Engineering & Computer Science). It focuses the talents of hundreds of researchers, teachers and students working on Europe on a single site. Its purpose is to create synergies, promote interdisciplinary dialogue, and generate collaborative research projects at home and abroad.
The ANU Centre for European Studies takes over the role formerly played by the National Europe Centre. It is funded jointly by ANU and the European Commission.

Date & time

Thu 21 Jul 2016, 12am

Location

L. J. Hume

Contacts

Marija Taflaga
6125 2462

SHARE

Updated:  14 July 2016/Responsible Officer:  Head of School/Page Contact:  CASS Marketing & Communications