MPs’ principals and the substantive representation of disadvantaged immigrant groups

Abstract

This article provides an alternative understanding of the substantive representation of immigrant-origin citizens compared to previous work in the ‘politics of presence’ tradition. Rather than assuming that the representational activities of members of parliaments (MPs) are underpinned by intrinsic motivations, it highlights extrinsic motives. Drawing on principal–agent theory, the article conceptualises MPs as delegates who are to act on behalf of their main principals, constituents and party bodies. This approach permits the rigorous analysis of the impact of electoral rules, candidate selection methods and legislative organisation on substantive representation. Based on an analysis of more than 20,000 written parliamentary questions tabled in the 17th German Bundestag (2009–2013), empirical findings suggest that electoral rules do not influence the relationship between MPs and their principals in relation to the substantive representation of disadvantaged immigrant groups; however, results indicate that candidate selection methods as well as powerful parliamentary party group leaderships do.

Keywords:

• Substantive representation
• immigrant-origin citizens
• parliamentary questions
• electoral rules
• candidate selection
• legislative organisation

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the ABC Conference 2016 in Bamberg and at the ‘Anxieties of Democracy’ workshop 2017 in Mainz. We thank Thomas Saalfeld, Marc Helbling, Jorge M. Fernandes, Henning Bergmann, Javier Martínez Cantó, Simon Fink, Daniel Gillion, Margret Hornsteiner, Stefanie John, Ira Katznelson, Caroline Schultz and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank Magdalena Stiegler, Elena Maier, David Beck, Johannes Geiger and Emanuel Slany for research assistance, and Joanna MacLeod for proofreading. Data have been obtained within the project ‘Pathways to Power: The Political Representation of Citizens of Immigrant Origin in Seven European Democracies (PATHWAYS)’. This project was funded by the ANR (France), DFG (Germany), ESRC (United Kingdom) and NWO (Netherlands) under the Open Research Area (ORA+) framework. The PATHWAYS consortium is formed by the University of Amsterdam (Professor Jean Tillie), the University of Bamberg (Professor Thomas Saalfeld), the University of Leicester (Professor Laura Morales) and the CEVIPOF-Sciences Po Paris (Professor Manlio Cinalli).

Notes

1 If dual candidates are entitled to seats in both electoral tiers, they are automatically considered elected in the SMD tier and the PR tier seat will be allocated to the next candidate on the list. Due to the seat compensation mechanism between electoral tiers, parties’ seat shares are not affected by these rules.

2 All data used in this article, including the raw text of parliamentary questions, have been collected in the context of the PATHWAYS project (www.pathways.eu).

3 Immigrant-related committees are labour and social affairs; education and research; family, elderly and women; domestic affairs; culture and media; human rights; economic development; petitions; and the investigation committee on the fascist terror of the ‘Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund’ (NSU).

4 We chose a negative binomial regression model over a poisson regression model because model diagnostics indicated overdispersion. Vuong tests further provided strong support for the use of zero-inflated mixed models.

5 All figures shown in this article were generated using the Stata scheme plotplain (Bischof 2017).

6 We tested other specifications of the zero-inflation equation, including other variables used in the count equation. However, since these variables did not turn out to be significant and further increased the complexity of the models without improving their explanatory power indicated by a growing BIC value (Bayesian Information Criterion), we decided against their inclusion.

7 Because MPs’ election modes are strongly dependent on their party affiliation (almost all SMD MPs are either CDU/CSU or SPD), we would run into collinearity issues if we used the manifesto variable or party dummies in the interaction. Thus, we rely here on the rather simplistic left–right distinction. However, we would argue that it is reasonable to use this rather crude measure in interaction with the committee variable to capture PPGs’ demands, because as Model 3 and the left-hand plot of Figure 3 have already shown, the committee effect is only significant for the three left-wing parties, such that it should make sense to compare the questioning behaviour of left-wing SMD and PR MPs who sit on migrant-related committees.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under Grant SA 2160/3-1 (principal investigator: Thomas Saalfeld).

Notes on contributors

Lucas Geese

Lucas Geese is a lecturer in the Faculty for Social Sciences, Economics, and Business Administration at the University of Bamberg. His research interests focus on political institutions, minority representation, parliaments and methods of textual analysis. [[email protected]]

Carsten Schwemmer

Carsten Schwemmer is a lecturer at the University of Bamberg. He is working on computational methods for conducting social research with a special focus on natural language processing. He is especially interested in political sociology, ethnic minority studies and social media. [[email protected]]