‘I Unpacked My Suitcase’: Immigrant Origin MPs and the Self-Representation of Identities

Political parties want minorities candidates to draw votes and display internal diversity. Willingly or unwillingly, they become ‘diversity ambassadors.’ However, after their election, political parties shun the overt showcasing of ethnic identities and do not accept that identity drives the candidates’ major policy positions. By contrast, representatives do sometimes actively advocate on behalf of their groups’ interests. Taking the Netherlands as its case, we study how MPs of immigrant origin portray their identities in their first political act as MP, their maiden speech. To study changes over time we cover over 30 years, spanning eleven parliamentary terms since the first immigrant-origin Member of Parliament took office in 1986. Maiden speeches are an excellent tool as this functions as a landmark for MPs to explain to the electorate, their parties and colleagues what and who they stand for and who they are. We argue that minority politicians work in a complex field of competing expectations. To understand this complexity, we need to move beyond Pitkin’s typology and investigate the tensions that lie between them. In this paper, we explore the tension between descriptive and substantive representation displayed by immigrant-origin candidates: between their resemblance to, and action taken on behalf of, groups they are supposed to represent. How do minority MPs deal with this tension in practice? How do they frame and phrase their own position? We find that – increasingly so - about half of the maiden speeches in our sample contain references to personal identity: regional Dutch locations, family ties, and ethnic background. Inspired by black feminist work we provide an intersectional analysis of how immigrant-origin MPs deal with their ‘otherness’ within a web of ascribed sets of identities that parties and constituents find acceptable.