That's what friends are for: how intergroup friendships promote historically disadvantaged groups’ substantive political representation

Abstract

The interests of historically disadvantaged groups risk being overlooked if they are not present in the decision-making process. However, a mere presence in politics does not guarantee political success. Often groups need allies to promote their interests successfully. We argue that one way to identify such allies is to judge politicians by whether they have friends in historically disadvantaged groups, as intergroup friendships have been shown to make people understand and feel empathy for outgroups. In other words, intergroup friendships may function as an important complement to descriptive representation. We test our argument with a unique survey that asks all elected political representatives in Sweden's 290 municipalities (response rate 79 per cent) about their friendship ties to, and their representation of, five historically disadvantaged groups: women, immigrants, youths, pensioners and blue-collar workers. We find a strong correlation between representatives' friendship ties to these groups and their commitment to represent them. The correlation is especially strong for youths and blue-collar workers, which likely can be explained by the fact that these groups usually lack crucial political resources (such as experience and education). We conclude that friendship ties function as an important complement to descriptive representation for achieving substantive representation.

Participation in civil society organizations and ethnic minorities’ interethnic friendships in Britain

“…Overall, the findings of study 2 support Blau's (1977) theory of structured associations insofar as they highlight the importance of demographically diverse intraorganizational contact opportunities for intergroup tie formation. More importantly, they support multiple previous studies linking individuals' interethnic friendship patterns to contact opportunities embedded within organized social settings (Currarini et al, 2010;Kokkonen & Karlsson, 2017;Schlueter, 2012;Smith et al, 2016). Finally, while the findings of our second study resemble those of previous quantitative investigations of IEF formation within CSOs (Martinovic et al, 2014;Muttarak, 2014), we go beyond the previous literature in two important respects.…”

Recognizing the Needs of Others: Municipal Candidates’ Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations to Support Immigrants and Religious Minorities

“…with those of Kokkonen and Karlsson (2017). A post-secondary education is also significantly positively associated with increased support for the interests of these minority groups.…”

“…We also adjust for a series of individual-level controls. Kokkonen and Karlsson (2017) conduct one of the few studies that explores attitudes toward immigrants among politicians and find that gender, education, age, partisan affiliation, and foreign background are significant determinants of these attitudes. We thus adjust for candidates' gender (female 1) and post-secondary education (university educated 1).…”

Allies Already Poised to Comply: How Social Proximity Affects Lactation at Work Law Compliance

“…For example, Reason and coauthors found that key factors in white undergraduates becoming “racial justice allies” were race‐related coursework and high‐quality interracial friendships (Reason et al : 530). Similarly, Kokkonen and Karlsson's study of Swedish elected representatives found that friendships between the politicians and groups to which the politicians did not belong, created greater empathy and ally‐activism by the politicians (Kokkonen and Karlsson ). These and other studies illustrate how empathy may grow as knowledge and familiarity with otherwise‐removed issues increases.…”

“…Teaching facts about social problems can create allies who would advocate against various forms of oppression. The extant research shows that such education could be formal, such as college courses, or informal, such as conversations (Broido ; Fingerhut ; Kokkonen and Karlsson ; Reason et al ; Russell ). These human resource specialists and supervising managers had a depth of understanding about the issue of milk expression at work to create effective support for their lactating employees.…”