How do minority-background political elites collaborate to pursue shared goals?

Existing research on political representation has tended to focus upon the descriptive characteristics of law-makers, and the extent to which their legislative records reflect the preferences of the group(s) they represent. However, such studies usually treat lawmakers as independent observations, and thus ignore the potentially important role that collaboration amongst political elites who want to secure policy outcomes for minority groups. We address this in our paper by taking adopting a networked approach to representation. By exploiting exponential random graph models, we analyse tens of millions of instances of 'co-signing' Early Day Motions (EDMs) in the British House of Commons from 1989 to the present day. In doing so we are able to identify the existence of collaboration networks between lawmakers of shared backgrounds according to their ethnicity, religion, class and educational backgrounds. We find significant effects for most groups that we test, but these tend to be strongest for ethnic and religious minorities. We also find that collaboration is most evident when relating to policy issues which are of direct relevance to inequalities pertaining to the group in question. These findings have advance our understanding of the underlying dynamics of the representation of minority groups, and demonstrate the importance to consider networks and relational data in future research in this area.