Visible Minority Women in German Politics: Between Discrimination and Targeted Recruitment

Abstract

By focusing on visible minority women in Germany, this article contributes to an emerging field of intersectional research on political representation. Research on minority women’s access to politics is still limited despite Germany’s sizable immigrant population. To fill this gap, this article provides recent data on the descriptive representation of visible minority women at both the federal and state level. Furthermore, it seeks to explain differences in political representation, primarily why the representation of minority women at the federal level and in some states is better than that of minority men, while in other states it is the reverse. Since traditional institutional explanations, such as gender quotas and electoral systems, provide only part of the solution to this intersectional puzzle, this article argues that informal practices of individual party elites need to be considered. Qualitative interviews with visible minority women in German politics suggest that some party elites actively promote minority women, while others overlook or even discriminate against them, contributing an additional explanation of why minority women’s access to politics is easier in some cases than in others.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anne Jenichen is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Aston University, Birmingham. She holds a doctoral degree in Political Science from the University of Bremen, where she also taught European Studies and Political Science before joining Aston, and a Diploma (equivalent to MA) in Political Science from the Free University Berlin. Her research interests include impact and change of international institutions; European human rights policy; the rights of disadvantaged groups, such as women, LGBTI people and religious minorities; and intersectionalities in domestic and international politics.

Notes

1 Migration background is the official term used in Germany to denote first- and second-generation immigrants, which includes non-German nationals residing in Germany, foreign-born Germans as well as German nationals of whom at least one parent is either foreign-born or a foreign national. A bit more than half of them possess German citizenship (Statistisches Bundesamt 2018, 18, 34f).

2 The only exception is Hughes (2016), who explains variation between the legislative representation of Muslim ethnic minority women in Western democracies with differences between majority and representative electoral systems.

3 ‘The Employment Equity Act defines visible minorities as “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour”’ (https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/ref/dict/pop127-eng.cfm).

4 Using this approach, however, excludes white women from other European countries (Turkey is here defined as a non-European country), despite their often foreign-sounding names, as well as ethnic Germans from former Soviet states because their immigration status usually is not visible (they are white and have German-sounding names). Discrimination against these groups notwithstanding, it can reasonably be assumed that they face less discrimination than politicians with a visible, non-European migration background, which is why they are excluded from the analysis. The same applies to politicians with a non-European migration background which, however, is not visible and therefore not perceived by others, because it can reasonably be assumed that this precludes racial discrimination.

5 No more detailed information on their background can be provided here, because, due to the small numbers of female visible minority politicians in Germany, this may compromise the promised anonymity.

6 See website of the German Bundestag: https://www.bundestag.de/abgeordnete/biografien/mdb_zahlen_19/frauen_maenner/529508 (last access: 28 January 2019).

7 The full sample indicates highest shares of visible minorities in the state parliaments of Bremen (18.1%), Hamburg (9.9%) and Berlin (5.6%); and also male visible minority deputies primarily represent the centre-left parties, but with slightly higher numbers for the CDU (4) and FDP (2).

8 There is one member of a state parliament whose ancestors are from Brazil, but since he is already of the fifth generation, I did not include him as a visible minority in the sample, despite foreign-sounding name.

9 This view, however, is contested by Hossain et al. (2016, 106) who have demonstrated for the municipal level that, if considering their share in the overall population, immigrant women are less well represented than immigrant men and non-immigrant women.

10 In 2011, the SPD introduced an internal 15% immigrant quota for party bodies (ZEIT Online 2011).

11 Based on which party held the constituency in the two previous elections (2009 and 2013) and on the number of seats reached in the previous election (2013).

12 For an overview of German state electoral systems, see https://www.wahlrecht.de/landtage/.

13 According to Schönwälder (2013, 644), it is much easier to become a member of parliament in a city-state than in a large territorial state, because the number of voters per seat is much lower. For instance, in North Rhine-Westphalia there are about four times as many votes required to win a seat than in Berlin.