Shirin Abrishami Kashani: Immigrant-Origin Communities and Political Representation in Germany

Background

Why are immigrant-origin communities politically underrepresented in Europe? While past academic studies have explored how party leaders select and elevate candidates, they've often overlooked the ambitions and aspirations of potential minority candidates themselves. How do they view the political climate around them, and how does the perception of discrimination in the electorate shape their decision to run for office as well as the political platforms they choose?

Recent incidents suggest that discrimination can be an important hindering factor for immigrant-origin minorities seeking to run for office. Just last year, the case of a Syrian-German refugee who withdrew his candidacy for parliament after facing a barrage of racist threats drew national attention. There's another layer to this question: some minorities do decide to run every election, despite the challenges they may face. What drives their decision and how does it shape their politics? Do they adopt platforms that align closely with the preferences of voters and party leaders to increase their chances of success? Or, faced with an increasingly discriminatory status quo, are they driven to champion a distinct, pro-minority stance?

Thanks to financial support from The Europe Center, I was able to conduct fieldwork and start obtaining answers to these questions. My field work took me to Germany, where I spent time in North-Rhine Westphalia, the largest German state with a significant immigrant community, and the capital city and political center, Berlin. My field research was based on participant observation while attending political events, engaging interviews with a range of individuals, from elected officials (from different political parties) to activists and academics working on the topic. I was also able to advance in terms of data collection. While I encountered some dead ends where I initially saw promising data sources prior to fieldwork, I was able to begin collecting election data from state electoral offices to create a new data set on German local elections results and candidate lists.

Insights from Fieldwork

A set of themes emerged from my field work:

A bi-directional response

My conversations with political candidates at both local and national levels confirmed my expectation based on the literature: minority responses to discrimination seem to go in both directions. Some candidates adopt a defiant “Jetzt erst Recht” (now more than ever) mentality to fight for minority rights when they’re most threatened. Others, sensing a hostile political environment and the need to carefully navigate it, moderate their public stances for wider appeal. From my conversations, it seems that there are a range of potential factors that determine the direction of the response, from psychological explanations like the strength of group-based interests to political realities like the share of the immigrant-origin constituency in the candidate’s electoral district.

Different logics of inclusion

It seems that minority candidates’ strategic considerations depend on the political party they want to run for. Different parties have varied logics for minority inclusion, based on differences in voter bases and nomination mechanisms. For instance, if a party primarily attracts conservative voters, the candidate might adopt a moderate stance as those voters shift rightward. In contrast, leftist parties might exhibit a more pro-immigrant stance and explicitly promote minority candidates, especially in the face of rising discrimination.

Urban ethnic enclaves

During my fieldwork, I was introduced to an additional potential channel that influences immigrant-origin minorities’ political socialization: the importance of ethnic enclaves in urban areas. I observed interesting variation in my interviewees’ political stances and considerations based on their environment, depending on whether they grew up and are embedded in communities with large immigrant networks, or instead were predominantly socialized among the majority society. This perspective, unanticipated before my research began, offers a promising avenue I am eager to explore further.

Next steps

Going forward, I hope to continue working on this project by assembling comprehensive data on candidates in party primaries across Germany and linking this to political outcomes data. I will do so by drawing on groundwork I laid this summer by visiting relevant research centers and political archives. The conceptual work undertaken and relationships formed during the summer will be invaluable as I write my second year field paper and start laying the foundation for my dissertation research.