Supporting Diversity on Party Lists: Attitudes of German Party Gatekeepers towards Enhancing Immigrant Representation

ABSTRACT

Previous studies have found that political parties play a crucial role in explaining why certain minoritised groups are largely excluded from the parliamentary sphere. However, researchers still know relatively little about the specific challenges surrounding the selection of immigrant-origin candidates. There is some understanding of the demand dimension (e.g. aspiring migrants’ lack of political resources), but not much has been discovered about the selection dimension thus far. This paper provides insights into party gatekeepers’ attitudes toward the migration issue in candidate selection. Our work focuses on Germany, where over a quarter of the population has a ‘migration background,’ but these groups are significantly underrepresented in parliaments. Our findings draw from large-scale survey data collected at seven parties’ nomination conferences for the 2017 Bundestag election. We conducted binary-logistical regressions to analyse how selecting party members’ attitudes and social characteristics affect their support for balancing state lists. Our results show that the gatekeepers’ hierarchical position within their parties (as grassroots or members of the party elite) has no impact on their support for increasing diversity. It is rather gatekeepers’ ideological self-positioning, gender and general sensitivity toward politically marginalised groups that have a significant impact on their support for the migration issue.

KEYWORDS:

• Descriptive representation
• immigrant-origin
• candidate selection
• party gatekeepers
• gender

Disclosure Statement

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

Data Availability Statement

The data can be made available upon request.

Notes

1 As defined by the Federal Statistical Office, ‘[…] the population group with a migration background consists of all persons who have immigrated into the territory of today’s Federal Republic of Germany after 1949, and of all foreigners born in Germany and all persons born in Germany who have at least one parent who immigrated into the country or was born as a foreigner in Germany’ (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2020). However, the statistical category of ‘Migrationshintergrund’ has received a lot criticism, both because a discriminatory terminology (Mecheril, 2004; Utlu, 2015), and due to methodological reasons (Elrick & Farah Schwartzman, 2015; Will, 2019).

2 Particularly in the large party branches at the state-level, this is attributed to the equitable distribution of list places between different regional districts (‘Regionalproporz’). A proportional placement procedure may consider the member size of the districts and the results from former elections. In some CDU and SPD state-level associations, the district places on a list are based on mathematical calculations (Höhne, 2017, p. 241).

3 When using the original four-staged variable in an ordinal regression model, we faced quasi separation due to low case numbers among those gatekeepers who evaluated gender-balancing as ‘very important,’ but immigrant representation as ‘not important at all’ (N = 20). We followed the proposal of Allison (2008) for constructing a dummy to receive valid maximum-likelihood estimators.

4 European party board membership was reported only by 6 respondents.

5 The coefficients for age are reported in the full regression table in Appendix 6. Across all models we observe that the odds to support ticket-balancing between immigrant and non-immigrant origin candidates on party lists are significantly lower amongst gatekeepers in the age groups between 31 and 60 compared to the reference category up to 20 years.

Additional information

Funding

The study #BuKa2017 was funded by the Foundation for Science and Democracy in Kiel, Germany.

Notes on contributors

Benjamin Höhne

Dr. Benjamin Höhne is Interim Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Münster. He is currently working on populism and gender. Within the German Political Science Association (GPSA), he is speaker of the Working Group on Political Parties. In 2022, he was DAAD/agi Research Fellow at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC. His dissertation on candidate selection for EU elections was granted the German Bundestag’s Science Award.

Aimie Bouju

Dr. Aimie Bouju is Research Manager at the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM). She wrote her doctoral thesis at the University of Duisburg-Essen on the topic “Parliamentary Representation in the Immigration Society – Intra-party Selection Processes of Bundestag Candidates with Migration Background” (in German).

Dario Landwehr

Dario Landwehr, BA, is a graduate student in the M.Sc. program Social Data Science at the University of Copenhagen, currently supported by a scholarship of the German Academic Exchange Foundation (DAAD) for master studies abroad.