Party Strategies and the Descriptive Representation of Ethnic Minorities: The 2010 British General Election

The electoral connection of ministerial selection in the UK

“…Although parties are strong actors within the recruitment of electoral candidates (Norris & Lovenduski, 1995;Sobolewska, 2013), the overall process remains decentralised (Bille, 2001;Denver, 1988;Hazan & Rahat, 2010;Hopkin, 2001). As a rule, candidates are nominated after a vote in every single constituency among the lists approved by the national party.…”

“…For example, the Labour Party has been using all-woman shortlists since the 1997 elections while the Conservatives introduced the 'A-list' of shortlisted priority candidates before the election of 2010 (Criddle, 2010). However, imposition of the list of candidates by the party headquarters, even for relatively principled reasons such as to improve the number of females and ethnic minorities in parliament, does not go down well with the local branches, and partly as a result of this, it does not always guarantee election (Criddle, 2010;Sobolewska, 2013). Therefore, central candidate selection is not possible in theory, and extremely rare in practice (Denver, 1988).…”

“…As for increasing the representativeness of the government, other personal attributes also proved to be important, e.g. the social origin (Rose, 1971), gender (Heppell, 2012), and possibly ethnicity (Sobolewska, 2013) of parliamentarians.…”

Inclusion through Exclusion

“…She studied ethnic minorities on the macro-+ micro-levels as well as additional factors and found that a candidate's selection depends on several factors: supply-side + demand-side + ethnic voting behaviour + the individual level of integration + practices of consociational accommodation + the electoral system. Sobolewska (2013) added that legal structure, ideological climate and intraparty organisation or party strategies also have to be considered. Verba et al (1995) referred to (social) capital as a resource for civic engagement.…”

Diversity Matters: Intersectionality and Women's Representation in the USA and UK: Table 1

“…On the other hand, studies have also shown that white men are the least likely to support a black female candidate (Philpott and Walton, 2007), that black women, and poor black women especially, are the worst represented (Strolovitch, 2006), whilst Muslim ethnic minority women are under-represented relative to Muslim ethnic minority men in both the US and UK (Hughes, forthcoming). In the UK, research has highlighted that women of colour have been helped by party strategies, including: the Labour party's use of all women shortlists (AWS), although up until 2005 this was not the case (Nugent and Krook, 2015); and through the Conservative party's creation of an 'A' list of candidates from which local associations were encouraged to select, and which included a large number of women and ethnic minorities (Sobolewska, 2013). However, we know little about the electoral ambitions of women of colour in the UK, again reflecting the relative paucity of literature exploring the interaction between gender and race in the UK.…”