Political candidates’ attitudes towards group representation

ABSTRACT

Our study examines the extent to which parliamentary candidates believe that membership of a certain social group allows Members of Parliament (MPs) to more effectively represent that group. Using the 2009 German Candidate Survey, we look at four social groups: women, immigrants, religious people and East Germans. The descriptive results indicate that support for group representation is highest for women and lowest for East Germans. The explanatory analyses reveal that women are more likely than men to believe that women are better at representing the interests of women. The same holds for immigrants, religious people, and East Germans. Candidates’ belief that MPs from a certain social group are better at representing that group tends to be limited to their own social group. Our results thus indicate that the belief that one should belong to a social group in order to effectively represent the interests of that group is mainly based on identity, rather than an overall belief in the link between descriptive and substantive representation. They also show that attitudes towards representation change significantly as a result of parliamentary socialisation, with candidates with parliamentary experience being significantly less likely to support the idea of group representation compared with those without such experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Group representation
• political candidates
• women
• immigrants
• East Germans
• religious people

Acknowledgements

The first author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of Victoria University of Wellington. Previous versions of the paper have been presented at panels at the 2016 APSA Annual Meeting and the 2016 ECPR General Conference. We would like to thank the participants of both panels for their useful feedback. We are also grateful to Sam Crawley and Anna Novis for their excellent editorial help.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Hilde Coffé is Professor in Politics at the University of Bath. Her research interests focus on public opinion, political behaviour, and political representation.

Marion Reiser is Professor of Political Science at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena. Her main areas of research include political elites, political parties, and parliaments.

Notes

1 Table A1 in the Appendix provides data on the representation of the various social groups studied in our paper in the German parliament at the time of data collection.

2 While East Germans are well represented in the German federal parliament, they tend to be underrepresented in leading position inside and outside of parliament (Gebauer, Salheiser, & Vogel, 2017; Kintz, 2011).

3 The parties included in the survey were Social Democrats (SPD), the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), Bündnis90/Die Grünen (Greens), the Liberals (FDP) and the Left Party (Die Linke).

4 More information about the survey can be found on the following link: http://gles.eu/wordpress/english/design/kandidatenstudie/.

5 We also explored the effect of religious denomination. Since it was not significantly related to any of our dependent variables, it is not included in our analyses below.

6 The vast majority (97.3 per cent) of the category not born in East Germany was born in West Germany. The rest was born in another European country. We also operationalised this variable by distinguishing the candidates that stood in East Germany from those who stood in West Germany. The main findings of these analyses were the same as those presented below. From those born in East Germany, 77 per cent stood as a candidate in East Germany, 23 per cent stood as a candidate in West Germany.

7 We also included the squared value of age to explore possible non-linear effects. Since the squared value was not significant in any of the models, we did not include it in the final analyses.

8 We also ran the analyses through Ordered Logistic regressions. Since the results of these analyses were similar to those using OLS regressions, we decided to present the OLS regressions.

Additional information

Funding

The first author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of Victoria University of Wellington.