Pathways to Parliament, Pathways to ‘Power’? Ethnic Minority Women’s Committee Assignments in Western European Parliaments

The issue of diversity in politics has gained resonance over the past decades. Although elected assemblies continue to be dominated by predominantly well-educated white men, we see that many established democracies have made efforts to redress the under-representation of traditionally disadvantaged groups, with recent figures now indicating a clear rise in the political presence of both women and ethnic minorities. But to what extent this presence translates into real political power within parliament? Descriptive representation of minority groups is believed to be important because it enhances the substantive representation of these groups and might ultimately change institutional norms themselves (Fraga et al. 2006, Lovenduski and Norris 2003). Studies have indeed demonstrated that ethnic minority men and women have different political attitudes and legislative behaviours than their ‘white’/majority counterparts (Celis 2007, Hardy-Fanta 1993, Jones 1997, Kittilson 2008). However, by focusing on descriptive and substantive outcomes, research tends to overlook important barriers to political and institutional power for minority groups within parliaments. Indeed, policy-making is an important source of power (Reingold 2000). Access to parliamentary committees is therefore crucial for women and ethnic minorities to achieve concrete legislative power and to fulfil legislative priorities since committees are the core of the policymaking process in many Western European parliaments. Hence, these nominations are considered as ‘scarce resources’ and minority groups are often kept away from high influential positions by the dominant, ‘white’ male group (Fraga et al. 2006, Michelle Heath, Schwindt‐Bayer, and Taylor‐Robinson 2005, Reingold and Smith 2014). While we know for instance that female legislators are often assigned to committees dealing with ‘feminine’ or women-related issues, we know less about how ethnicity and gender shape MPs’ institutional mobility within European parliaments. This study aims at exploring the issue of committee assignments among minority groups in 5 Western European countries, namely Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, between the early 1990s and the mid-2010s. The analysis is based on new and original quantitative data from the comparative Pathways project (http://www.pathways.eu/).