The Representation of Immigrant-Origin Minorities in Spain: the Impact of Residential Concentration, Ethnicity and Political Opportunities

The political representation of immigrant minorities has attracted increasing academic and political interest over the last few years. Yet, with the sustained increase of immigrant populations all over Europe, an increasing body of scholarship points to the alarming gap in the political representation of citizens of immigrant descent in European societies. What are the factors that allow us gaining a better understanding of the dynamics of these gaps in representation? Is a high concentration of immigrant-origin minorities enough for immigrant-origin minorities to gain political representation? Or are certain groups of parties more prone to nominate candidates than others, or to do so attending specific minority groups? ¿What type of strategies, if any, do parties follow in the nomination of candidates of immigrant background? To what extent parties responses are conditioned by their own characteristics such ideology, size or party family; or by party system factors; or by the demands of inclusion by specific groups? This paper analyses how these factors — political opportunities, residential concentration or ethnicity — interact to help to account for the different levels of representation of immigrant-origin minorities at the local level in the Spanish case. Spain is an ideal case study to test these theoretical propositions regarding migrants’ political representation, particularly since the rapid increase of the foreign-born population has resulted in a diverse intake of multiple origin groups with different patterns of residential concentration. The paper studies last 2011 and 2015 local elections in municipalities with the largest concentration of immigrant-origin residents of different ethnic backgrounds: Romanians, Moroccans, Bulgarians, Latin Americans and Europeans from EU15 and examines how residential concentration, ethnicity and party competition interact to lead to better or worse outcomes of descriptive political representation of these groups.