Who Represents the Interests of Citizens of Immigrant Origin? An Intersectional Analysis of Ethnicity and Gender in Dutch Parliament, 1986-2012

Citizens of immigrant origin (CIOs) have been at the center of political attention for several decades. However, the past years this attention has become explicitly gendered. The fate of CIO women previously was primarily a concern of parties and feminist women MPs on the left. Today their position and particularly their emancipation has moved to the heart of the agenda of male dominated populist and conservative political parties; often as part of a nationalist or anti-immigrant program. In other words, a broad variety of political actors in terms of political ideology, gender and ethnicity are making ‘representative claims’ about CIOs. This paper asks: who, puts CIO issues on the parliamentary agenda, how is this gendered and how did this change over time? Drawing on the Netherlands it analyses which parliamentarians – in terms of gender, ethnicity and party affiliation - have tabled parliamentary questions relating to the fate of CIOs and examines their content and framing from 1986-2012. Our analysis reveals several shifts over time since the first question has been tabled in 2000. Until 2006 most petitioners were leftwing majority women; since 2006 rightist majority men and leftwing ethnic minority women have been dominant in debates concerning ethnic minority women. Leftist petitioners tend to be in favor of accommodating group rights and address specific problems without negative reference to religion and culture. Rightist petitioners point to religion and culture – often combined as ‘Islamic culture’ – as the main problem. Our findings increase our theoretical understanding of the relation between descriptive (numerical presence of an identity group) and substantive political representation (interests of identity groups) through an intersectional lens.