Double Jeopardy or Multiple Advantage? Intersectionality and Political Representation

Regional and Ethnic Minorities

“…This differential effect is referred to as intersectionality-plus by Weldon (2008), suggesting that there are effects for being a woman and for belonging to a minority group, but also separate effects for belonging to both. Indeed, political inclusion and marginalization can occur for different subgroups of regional and ethnic minorities at the same time (Mügge 2016;Mügge and Erzeel 2016). For the study of political representation, intersectionality means capturing membership in different socially and politically relevant dimensions.…”

“…This means that future research should focus on how substantive representation takes place, rather than be preoccupied with the question whether (on average) it does take place and whether it is linked to descriptive representation. This way, future research can move beyond the assumption of a simple direct link that reduces ethnic and regional minorities to a single homogeneous group, and also consider the possibility that legislators represent a privileged subgroup only (Mügge and Erzeel 2016). Novel approaches like process tracing are needed to complement the commonly studied policy outcomes in order to have stronger claims that we truly observe substantive representation.…”

Developments in gender and U.S. politics: A call for intersectionality

“…Recently, scholars have brought macro‐level factors into interaction to explain intersectional puzzles with respect to political institutions. Intersectionality works from the premise that power relations between groups and organizations interact to produce complex inequalities in society (Mügge & Erzeel, ). Scholars using intersectional perspectives analyze not only the multiple jeopardy facing minority groups (King, ); they are also interested in the practices and opportunity structures that reinforce the hegemony of dominant groups in political institutions (Childs & Hughes, ; Hughes, ; Swain & Lien, ).…”

Whose equality? Measuring group representation

“…Work that applies the intersectional paradigm to political representation is an emerging field. Scholars have studied the ‘classical’ mechanisms that the mainstream literature identifies as explanatory factors for the political inclusion and exclusion of disadvantaged groups in elected office (Mügge and Erzeel, 2016). Mechanisms that have been scrutinized are the influence of candidate recruitment and selection (Bejarano, 2013; Freidenvall, 2016; Hardy-Fanta, 2013), electoral systems, quotas (Bird, 2016; Davidson-Schmich, 2016), and identity networks (Beckwith, 2000; Evans, 2014; Laperrière and Lépinard, 2016).…”