Kåre Vernby

Why are Immigrants Underrepresented in Politics? Evidence from Sweden

Widespread and persistent political underrepresentation of immigrant-origin minorities poses deep challenges to democratic practice and norms. What accounts for this underrepresentation? Two types of competing explanations are prevalent in the literature: accounts that base minority underrepresentation on individual-level resources and accounts that emphasize political opportunity structures. However, due to the lack of data suitable for testing these explanations, existing research has not been able to adjudicate between these theories. Using registry-based microdata covering the entire Swedish adult population between 1991 and 2010 our study is the first to empirically evaluate these alternative explanations. We examine election outcomes to municipal councils over the course of six elections and find that variation in individual-level resources cannot explain immigrants’ underrepresentation. Further, when comparing immigrants and natives who face comparable political opportunity structures a large representation gap remains. Instead, we argue that discrimination by party gatekeepers plays a more significant role in perpetuating the underrepresentation of immigrants than do individual resources or structural variables.

Xenophobia and Left Voting

In this article, the authors set out to evaluate two competing mechanisms that may account for the negative relationship between xenophobia and left voting. Xenophobia may reduce left voting because parties of the right are more conservative on issues relating to immigration and ethnic relations (the policy-bundling effect), or it may reduce left voting because many potential left voters lack sympathy with the groups to whom redistribution is thought to be directed (the anti-solidarity effect). These two mechanisms imply radically different scenarios for political competition. Using a multilevel modeling approach, the authors analyze the data compiled in fifteen different surveys carried out in ten Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries between 1990 and 2000. This study is the first to draw out the implications of these mechanisms for left voting and to subject them to empirical scrutiny in a large-scale comparative study. The results are consistent with the existence of a relatively strong policy-bundling effect; by contrast, the anti-solidarity effect is trivial in most of the surveys analyzed.