The political representation of minoritized groups in times of crisis: Covid-19 and beyond

ABSTRACT

Minoritized groups have been severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting the need to better understand how they and their interests were (not) represented in the political process during this challenging period. We identify common and unique features of Covid-19 and past crises, and discuss why the pandemic may have represented a moment for change before identifying gaps in past research. Finally, we present seven articles in this Special Issue that analyze the political representation of minoritized groups in politics, the news media and online. This Special Issue brings together a diverse group of scholars using different theoretical approaches, methodologies and data sources. Using interdisciplinary and intersectional perspectives, we shed new light on minoritized people’s representation during Covid-19 across the globe, focusing on how ethnic and racial groups have experienced the pandemic themselves.

KEYWORDS:

• Political representation
• minorities
• Covid-19
• crisis
• intersectionality
• mixed methods

Introduction

The Covid-19 pandemic has disappeared from front-page news. Over the past three years, it has become clear that the pandemic has not only been a health, but also a human, economic and social crisis. While most people have been affected during the pandemic in one way or another, not everyone has suffered equally. For example, infection and mortality rates have been higher among individuals from ethnic and racially minoritized groups, but also among those with lower socio-economic status (Baena-Díez et al. 2020; Williamson et al. 2020). Some minoritized groups were already in poorer health before the pandemic, but Covid-19 has further increased pre-existing racial and ethnic health disparities. Minoritized groups have been disproportionately represented among essential workers and thus had a higher risk of being infected (Morales and Ali 2021) and dying from Covid-19 (Tai et al. 2021). Gender, sexual orientation, social class and geography have further compounded these unequal effects. Women in particular are overrepresented in economic sectors that have been hit the worst by the crisis (Holder, Jones, and Masterson 2021); they spent more time on unpaid care than men (Barroso and Horowitz 2021), while having faced an increased risk of domestic violence (Ebert and Steinert 2021). Moreover, female politicians were largely absent in policy responses to the pandemic (Smith 2020), thus inhibiting women’s (descriptive) representation.

At the same time, we have seen a resurgence of nationalism, racism and anti-migrant sentiments. For example, within the European Union, states unilaterally closed their borders and pursued nationalistic policies to secure health products, protective equipment and vaccines (Wang 2021). The absence of a global or regional leadership has become painfully obvious during the crisis (Lilleker et al. 2021). With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic located in Wuhan, China – and some (including former President of the United States Donald Trump) referring to it as the “Chinese virus” – there has been a surge in anti-Asian racial discrimination within countries (Gao and Liu 2021), which has also spread to other minoritized groups including Muslims, asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants (Clissold et al. 2020; Gao and Liu 2021; Human Rights Watch 2020; Wang 2021). In this sense, the Covid pandemic can be seen as the latest event to trigger a “familiar” reaction to national crises, where the most convenient marginalized group becomes the target (Beazer et al. 2023), and intergroup tensions may already have existed prior to the pandemic (Jedwab et al. 2021).

To mitigate these tensions, crisis responses such as the one to the Covid-19 pandemic create the need for collective unity, a feeling of “we-ness” (Lilleker et al. 2021, 348). It is of utmost importance that this approach is inclusive, as “the best responses are those that protect all members of the population” (White 2020, 1251). In order to do so, it is necessary that all segments of the population are represented in political, policy and media discourses, and that they are represented by being allowed to participate in decision making (formal representation), partaking in politics (descriptive representation), their interests being part of the political decision-making (substantive representation) and being portrayed in politics (symbolic representation) (Dahlerup and Leyenaar 2013; Lombardo and Meier 2016; Pitkin 1967).

In this Special Issue, we turn our attention to how minoritized groups were represented during the pandemic in the broad sense, which we argue is a crucial first step for inclusive responses to future crises. We zoom in on the political representation of minoritized groups during the Covid-19 pandemic and explore phenomena linked to othering within and beyond borders in different settings. We focus on how direct health-related and social inequalities have impacted minoritized groups, paying special attention to intersectionality. By offering an interdisciplinary perspective that extends past the study of Western countries, we move beyond existing work, shedding light on media and policy debates, but importantly also on how ethnic and racial groups have experienced the pandemic themselves. The diversity aspect is not only reflected in the Special Issue’s content; it also brings together scholars from different disciplines, geographic regions and ethnic backgrounds. Before moving on to the contributions of the Special Issue themselves, we locate the Covid-19 pandemic in light of past crises and highlight similarities as well as unique features, summarize and highlight gaps in extant research, and discuss why the pandemic could have been a moment and opportunity for broader social change.

Past crises, COVID-19 and a moment for change?

Looking back at past pandemics, but also other types of crises, helps us to better understand the challenges that the Covid-19 pandemic has posed for the political participation of minoritized groups and to identify unique features of this period. A crisis can be defined as an “unexpected, and nonroutine event or series of events that create high levels of uncertainty” (Ulmer, Sellnow, and Seeger 2022, 207) with disease outbreaks being one particular type of crisis. A core feature of pandemics is a widespread geographic scope (Morens, Folkers, and Fauci 2009) thus leading to crises with a potentially global impact. We can therefore draw comparisons between Covid-19 and past pandemics, but also other global crises. Research has, for example, compared the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change, not least because of the effects of climate change on health and the risk of the emergence of future pandemics (Pörtner et al. 2022). While in both cases global efforts are required to mitigate risks, the Covid-19 response conveyed urgency that efforts to tackle climate change are currently missing (Ruiu, Ragnedda, and Ruiu 2020). This is likely to be related to the Covid-19 risk being more concrete, while climate change is currently mostly experienced by those already disadvantaged who remain largely invisible in Western (media) discourses (Ruiu, Ragnedda, and Ruiu 2020, 2607). Similarly, Covid-19 and climate change do not affect people equally and both are exacerbating already existing inequalities, while the competition for limited resources is likely to weaken (international) solidarity (Manzanedo and Manning 2020).

Existing research has also drawn links to past pandemics, such as the 1918 influenza virus (also called “Spanish Flu”) (cf., e.g. Dionne and Turkmen 2020; Elias et al. 2021). Particularly research from the social and behavioral sciences has highlighted the impacts of pandemics on intergroup relations and social cohesion (Van Bavel et al. 2020). Feeling threatened can generally increase prejudice towards outgroups, and health threats in particular can lead to higher levels of xenophobia and ethnocentrism. In fact, the tendency to blame marginalized groups for pandemics and health crises has been well established (Dionne and Turkmen 2020). Especially othering, racist and xenophobic responses and other negative consequences for minoritized groups have been identified as a common feature of pandemics (White 2020). Thus, how societies respond to crises and what kind of inclusive interventions they seek to mitigate these tendencies is crucial.

One important strategy is to create an inclusive “we”, because “a person viewed as one of ‘us’ is assumed to pose less of a threat than a person viewed as one of ‘them'” (Schaller and Neuberg 2012, 41). This is not only a relevant aspect for social cohesion but also from a crisis and health communication point of view. The question for political and societal leadership during the pandemic then is how well minoritized groups are represented and the extent to which politicians are able to create a sense of shared identity. However, “[r]ather than being an equaliser, given its ability to affect anyone, Covid-19 policy responses have disproportionately affected people of colour and migrants – people who are over-represented in lower socioeconomic groups, have limited health-care access, or work in precarious jobs” (Devakumar et al. 2020, 1194).

Overall, when compared to past pandemics, social conflict during Covid-19 has remained relatively low, which might be explained by less frightening symptoms and a better-informed public (Jedwab et al. 2021). As every crisis also represents an opportunity that may not have existed during normal times (Ulmer, Sellnow, and Seeger 2022, 8), the Covid-19 pandemic may have the potential to bring people together. It holds the potential for profound change by disrupting routines. According to van de Wiele and Papacharissi (2021, 1144), it represents a “long moment of in between”, in which new hierarchies have the potential to emerge, hegemonic social structures can be disrupted and reimagined, and “new possibilities for agency and resistance are generated” (1143). Similarly, Mocatta and Hawley (2020, 119) see crises as “points of inflection: instructive opportunities to rethink old ways of behaving, to pause, re-evaluate, and choose new paths”. In terms of political representation, it opens up a window of opportunity to provide access to all actors, including those that are traditionally less visible. One example is frontline workers who featured prominently in the public debates and whose struggles and roles in society have been discussed from different angles. We argue that the inclusion of minoritized groups at this crucial point in time in political and public debates is particularly important for societal cohesion. As pandemic experiences are highly subjective and unequal, these debates allow a glimpse into the lives of others, especially those less advantaged. This in turn may foster solidarity and empathy among societies. Yet, our current knowledge of the political representation of minoritized groups during Covid-19 is limited.

Gaps in existing research on COVID, ethnicity and representation

Given the wide-ranging impact of the pandemic, it should come as no surprise that, by now, a wealth of academic studies have related to Covid. Nevertheless, certain questions have been prioritized and received far more attention than minoritized people’s representation, as this subsection will discuss.

The first and biggest strand of research on ethnic cleavages during the Covid pandemic focuses on health outcomes. Countless studies and, by now, meta-reviews have shown that ethnically minoritized groups face worse health outcomes than majorities across Western countries (Holtgrave et al. 2020; Mackey et al. 2021; Mude et al. 2021). Ethnically minoritized people have been shown to be disproportionately likely to get infected with Covid-19, to subsequently be hospitalized, and even to die from Covid-19 infections, which means that Covid exacerbated pre-existing health inequalities. A host of different factors has been proposed to explain these patterns, including minoritized people’s stronger exposure to the virus and lesser observance of social distancing, for instance, due to living and employment conditions (Best et al. 2021; Crozier et al. 2022), but also pre-existing health conditions and reduced access to healthcare (Parolin and Lee 2022). The lack of representation of minoritized groups in health research is well-established – a problem that has pervaded studies on Covid-19 as well (Etti et al. 2021).

Especially since the development of vaccines, scholars have, however, turned their attention to institutional distrust as a key concern (Davies et al. 2021; Kritzinger et al. 2021; Robinson et al. 2021). Studies have shown that, while ethnically minoritized groups faced worse health outcomes, they were also more hesitant to get vaccinated (Hussain et al. 2022; Romer and Jamieson 2020) due to their greater reliance on social media and religious leaders for information, belief in conspiracy theories and mistrust of official information provided by governments, media, medicine and science (Abba-Aji et al. 2022; Allington et al. 2021; Armstrong et al. 2022; Beazer et al. 2023; Kamal, Hodson, and Pearce 2021; Woolf et al. 2021). As community members were more likely to be trusted than institutions, scholars have consequently suggested that community engagement might play a key role in resolving health inequalities (Best et al. 2021; Castellon-Lopez et al. 2022; Hussain et al. 2022; Kamal, Hodson, and Pearce 2021). For instance, community health workers have been shown to bridge gaps between minoritized groups and formal healthcare systems (Valeriani et al. 2022).

This Special Issue could be seen as an extension of that literature. However, rather than focusing on what might bridge institutions and minoritized communities, we turn our attention to making the institutions themselves more inclusive. Doing so represents a shift away from the bulk of Covid-19 studies that focus on why minoritized people distrust institutions more than majorities towards why institutions might be (dis)trusted (see also Best et al. 2021; Evans et al. 2022; Gorfinkel et al. 2023). It recognizes that the representation of minoritized groups during times of crisis is not solely dependent on the actions of minoritized communities themselves, but also on the institutions and systems in place. Therefore, this Special Issue investigates whether and how institutions have represented minoritized people and their concerns during the pandemic. This approach adds to existing understandings in several ways:

First, our contributions focus on the representation of minoritized people. While institutional distrust has propped up as a major theme in the literature on ethnicity and Covid-19, far less attention has been paid to whether institutions such as governments or media represented minoritized people well. This is especially troublesome because representation – or the lack thereof – has been shown to have real consequences during the pandemic. For instance, the severe underrepresentation of minoritized groups in clinical studies on Covid-19 vaccines has been linked to minoritized groups’ vaccine hesitancy and worse health outcomes (Etti et al. 2021; Gilmore-Bykovskyi, Jackson, and Wilkins 2021; Murali et al. 2023). Closer to our focus, Evans et al. (2022) report that in U.S. American states with more Native American legislators and thus greater descriptive representation, fewer Native Americans were infected with Covid-19. Consequently, understanding the representation of minoritized groups might be a first step to help reduce the health inequalities that were exacerbated by Covid-19. By zooming in on representation as a specific phenomenon, we hope to get to the root of precisely how institutions included or excluded minoritized groups during the pandemic and provide more specific insights as to how inequalities can be mitigated rather than exacerbated in the future.

Second, our contributions focus on spheres that have received relatively little attention in the literature on ethnicity and Covid-19: diversity among institutions, minoritized groups and contexts. The majority of existing research studies the general populations of Western countries, showing, for instance, that White U.S. Americans trust institutions more than Black or Latinx people (Best et al. 2021; Kamal, Hodson, and Pearce 2021; Mackey et al. 2021). This Special Issue, however, turns its lens onto, first, politics and media as sites of investigation, which reframes the question to how these institutions included or excluded minoritized groups during a pandemic that was also racialized as “the Chinese virus”. Additionally, we move beyond comparisons between ethnic majorities and minorities to uncover the intersectional diversity among minoritized people, thereby drawing attention to the internal diversity among minoritized groups rather than assuming all minoritized people’s experiences are similar and solely defined along ethnic lines. For instance, as discussed above, the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic have been inherently gendered, but we currently know less about how gender intersects with ethnicity to exacerbate or limit inequalities. An intersectional analysis can unpack the complexity of factors influencing representations, recognize the vast diversity within different identity categories. Finally, we aim to round out the existing picture by not solely focusing on the Global North but also incorporating insights from the Global South – which has been hit hard by the pandemic and yet severely understudied.

The articles in this Special Issue

As the pandemic’s position in the spotlight has faded, we argue that it is time to turn an interdisciplinary social sciences perspective to the inequalities uncovered and exacerbated by the pandemic, which still remain. While Covid-19 has been studied from a health and a social angle, remarkably little work has focused on political representation and that of minoritized groups. In light of ethnic and racial groups having been hit worse by the pandemic and them feeling generally less well politically represented, it is a crucial question how minoritized groups experienced the pandemic politically. In this Special Issue, we thus focus on “The political representation of minoritized groups during the Covid-19 pandemic”, an aspect that has thus far been neglected by research. We aim to shed light on how minoritized groups were represented in the democratic process during this global crisis in various contexts and settings. This concerns first and foremost ethnic and racially minoritized groups as well as migrants, but we also utilize an intersectional lens. Overall, we focus on how well public and political debates represented people with ethnic and racial backgrounds during this crucial point in time, but we also lay bare the experiences of minoritized groups themselves, investigating the extent to which they felt politically represented. Importantly, we also move beyond existing work by providing an interdisciplinary perspective that brings together scholars from different disciplines, geographic regions and ethnic backgrounds.

This Special Issue collects seven contributions, and while each of the papers has a unique topical and geographical focus, they speak directly to each other through their thematic focus on the pandemic, political representation and ethnically and racially minoritized groups. Additionally, by applying a social identity lens to ethnic (and other) cleavages in political representation, this Special Issue makes a uniquely coherent contribution. It not only promises to uncover disparities during the pandemic, but to also provide lessons on understanding minorities’ political representation during crises, which can be summarized in three overarching themes:

The political representation of minoritized groups in the democratic process

Beyond its impact on people’s physical health, Covid-19 also had significant social consequences. In many countries, ethnic minorities are underrepresented in the political process and parliaments in particular (Auer et al. 2023; Hänni and Saalfeld 2020). Geurts et al. (2024) explore how minoritized citizens with a migrant-background perceive the extent to which they and their interests are politically represented and what role intersecting categories such as gender, ethnicity and education play. The empirical analysis based on survey data from the Dutch Ethnic Minority Election Study 2021 shows, for example, that citizens who consider themselves Muslim and those with university degrees perceive less political representation.

Relatedly, de Jong (2024) zooms in on how minoritized citizens evaluate political representatives with whom they do or do not identify. Drawing on original data from nineteen focus group interviews with ninety-eight participants conducted in the Netherlands and Germany, she finds that citizens with migrant backgrounds primarily want representatives who imagine, judge and act on behalf of their political concerns. In theory, many believe that descriptive politicians are better capable of doing so but doubt their ability to achieve change within majority-dominated politics. Having said that, they still value descriptive politicians for their symbolic impact in challenging enduring stereotypes. Intersectional categories of race, gender, class and other social positions, as well as party systems and legacies of descriptive politicians, play a crucial role in minoritized citizens’ assessment.

Liu and Wan (2024) look at another aspect of political representation, namely the representation of the interests of migrant workers’ and migrant spouses’ in Covid-19 policies, measures and restrictions. The study is based on an analysis of transcripts of plenary sittings, committees and national affairs forums of the Taiwanese government using a corpus-assisted discourse analysis. Their results reveal a differential treatment between both groups with migrant workers being treated as disposable commodities and sources of Covid-19 infections, while migrant spouses are perceived as victims who deserve protection.

The political representation of minoritized groups in news media

News media have not only been a crucial source of information during the pandemic, but they have also brought attention to how different groups experienced it. As direct interaction during the pandemic was limited, understanding how minoritized citizens have been represented in media discourses is crucial. The media portrayal of these groups can influence public opinion as well as stereotypes while also being able to diminish them (Schiappa, Gregg, and Hewes 2005). Especially during times of crisis, media frame what crisis response strategy should be adopted and who is responsible for the crisis in the first place (Coombs 2006); they thus play a crucial role for social cohesion. Beazer et al. (2024) examine how migrant women were portrayed in British and German news during the Covid-19 pandemic. Using a mixed method approach that combines computational methods with informed grounded theory on a diverse news corpus, the study provides a nuanced analysis of the representational modes of solidarity, empathy and pity. It also shows how intersectional identity markers are used to construct the racial, ethnic and socioeconomic dimensions of the “migrant woman”.

De Carvalho et al. (2024) zoom in on the media representation of another often neglected minoritized group: indigenous people. Specifically, the study is interested in the framing of the Yanomami people during Covid-19 in U.S. news media. The results based on a qualitative content analysis reveal four main frames focusing on victimization, illegal mining and policing, environmental impact and indigenous sovereignty. They find a lack of direct representations of Yanomami people in favor of the inclusion of more conventional sources, such as activists, researchers and government officials.

The political representation of minorities in the online sphere and beyond

As many social interactions have moved online during the pandemic and especially the lockdown periods, so have expressions of racism, xenophobia and anti-Asian sentiments. Odağ and Moskovits’ (2024) qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews investigates how citizens with Asian heritage living in Germany have experienced online hate during the Covid-19 pandemic. The study suggests that experiences of othering and scapegoating were widespread, rendering counter-speech ineffective and pushing individuals to passive coping strategies.

In light of the structural inequalities and racism that have been revealed and become more visible during the Covid pandemic, Sobande and Amponsah (2024) turn to everyday emotions, expressions and experiences of Black people and how they are reframed in various social spheres including the media, market, public and political institutions. The study focuses on the experiences of Black people in the UK and Belgium during the Covid-19 pandemic in relation to “Black joy” and uses bricolage methodology that brings together analysis of adverts, media narratives and elements of the overall landscape of public representations. The study exemplifies how the pandemic provided an opportunity for an uprising against racism that has been somewhat diminished by media and marketplace brands jumping on the topic and using it as “gestural anti-racism”. At the same time, social media such as TikTok promote joyful rather than negative content which has amplified Black joy and thus promoted a more apolitical representation.

Conclusion

To conclude, this Special Issue contributes to better understanding the ongoing impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on the political representation of minoritized groups in various world regions using a broad range and combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, including qualitative text analysis, discourse analysis, content analysis, network analysis, regression analysis and computational approaches. To this end, studies draw on diverse data sources such as surveys, focus groups, interviews, parliamentary speeches, official government documents, mainstream and minority news articles and social media data. The papers in this Special Issue study important events such as elections, but also the broader news coverage about Covid-19 and parliamentary debates. Importantly, contributions also examine the experiences of minoritized groups and their perceived political representation directly. While the core focus is on the pandemic’s effect on different ethnic groups and migrants, we pay special attention to the impact of intersectionality throughout the Special Issue. Overall, this Special Issue is the first to shed light on the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the political representation of ethnic and racially minoritized groups and migrants from an intersectional, cross-disciplinary and comparative perspective. It thus makes an important contribution to the debate on the social effects of the pandemic on minoritized groups in different regions of the world, identifying both shared and unique experiences of these often-neglected groups.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Editors and especially Amanda Eastell-Bleakley for their guidance and support throughout the editing process of this Special Issue. The Special Issue is an outcome of the 2022 European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Joint Session Workshop “Health, diversity, and the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic for political representation” and we would like to thank the participants for their valuable feedback. Last but not least, thank you to the colleagues who have agreed to join this Special Issue.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The work by Stefanie Walter was funded by the Emmy Noether Program from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) funding no. WA 4161/1-1.