Democratic Consequences of Harassment in Danish Local Politics

Elected representatives and candidates are subjected to harassment, intimidation and violence when campaigning and when conducting their representative duties in the parliamentary, electoral and party arenas, even in long-established democracies. Survey-based studies show that elected representatives and candidates with ethnic minority/immigrant background report experiencing harassment, intimidation, and violence more than candidates and representatives with majority background. Scholars have highlighted the need for research on both female and male elected representatives and candidates in analyses of violence in politics for better understanding the gendered dimensions of violence and its democratic consequences. Two historically underrepresented groups in Danish local politics, women and ethnic minority spur specific interest regarding representation and democratic consequences. Based on in-depth interviews with municipal representatives with ethnic minority background in Denmark, we gain a thorough understanding of, first, the character of the harassment, intimidation and violence experienced. Second, we show how the harassment, intimidation and violence have consequences for how they campaign, represent, perform safety work to protect themselves, and they view their future political careers. In particular, we show how their campaigning is restricted in activities and geography, and that their freedom to talk about immigration/integration politics are restricted, hence, harassment, intimidation and violence disrupt the possible coupling between descriptive and substantive representation. With an intersectional lens, we furthermore show that these experiences and their effects are gendered and racialized, hampering the representation of ethnic minority women to a larger extent than that of men. In sum, we show that ethnic minorities, which are underrepresented in most if not all political systems, are also given harder working conditions, hence, further hindering their political representation.