Since the end of the second world war, and increasingly over the past decades, political scientists have been paying more attention to issues of equality tied to governments’ welfare policies and their impact on specific forms and instances of inequality domains, particularly with respect to historically discriminated groups such as ethnic minorities and women. On the one hand there has been much talk about the importance of the reduction of social and economic inequalities and of the inclusion of minorities, but there has also been a significant increase in populist, nationalist and racist discourse in many European countries in the last 6-7 years, which has worsened with the economic crisis. This shift in political discourse towards explicitly racist and exclusionary ideas has often been accompanied by a fear that the model of 'social' (i.e. welfare) Europe that has brought increasing social protection and guarantees in the second half of the twentieth century is now being threatened by dispossessed marginalized minorities: in the eyes of those who to talk about an “abuse” of the welfare state by certain social groups (regardless of whether such groups are identified in terms of ethnicity, class, or nationality) the underlying assumption is that the beneficiaries of certain social policies have not ‘earned’ help from the state either because they are not contributing enough to society and are incapable of improving their own situation (therefore policies aiming to achieve equity with measures such as affirmative action and minority quotas are challenged as ‘unfair’ because they appear to favor some over others—and consequently they seem to negate the more commonly understood concept of fairness as uniform distribution), or because they are not seen as belonging to society in the first place. This paper aims at investigating the relationship between social inequality, political participation and substantive representation.
