Political narratives in representation:Maiden speeches of ethnic minority members of parliament

The maiden speech – the first speech given by a newly elected member of parliament (MP) – is a tradition in many parliaments, a personalized rite of passage to political power. As ethnic minority MPs remain relative newcomers, the maiden speech is, for them, even more politically charged. How do ethnic minority MPs represent their identities in this transformative moment? Our data set includes 93 ethnic minority MPs who have held a seat in the Dutch parliament, covering 88 maiden speeches, spanning 11 cycles (1986–2023). The diachronic and intersectional analysis shows that the relation between descriptive, substantive and symbolic representation for historically marginalized groups fluctuates and is influenced by the political environment. The ‘firsts’ of a particular gender/ethnicity intersectional group are less likely to narrate a minority identity than non-firsts. Progressive party ideology influences the extent to which ethnic minority MPs emphasize an (intersectional) minoritized identity. Personal stories and family histories are often used to counter stereotypes, unmute silenced cultures and share values. The focus on the maiden speech as a political narrative sheds light on the blurry lines between substantive, symbolic and descriptive representation. The political narrative is a strategic tool for MPs from historically disadvantaged groups to represent collective identities

Intersectionality on the go:The diffusion of Black feminist knowledge across disciplinary and geographical borders

Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989 as a critique of feminist and critical race scholarship's neglect of—respectively—race and gender. Since then, the concept has been interpreted and reinterpreted to appeal to new disciplinary, geographical, and sociocultural audiences, generating heated debates over its appropriation and continued political significance. Drawing on all 3,807 publications in Scopus that contain the word “intersectionality” in the title, abstract, or keywords, we map the spread of intersectionality in academia through its citations. Network analysis reveals the contours of its diffusion among the 6,098 scholars in our data set, while automated text analysis, manual coding, and the close reading of publications reveal how the application and interpretation of intersectional thinking has evolved over time and space. We find that the diffusion network exhibits communities that are not well demarcated by either discipline or geography. Communities form around one or a few highly referenced scholars who introduce intersectionality to new audiences while reinterpreting it in a way that speaks to their research interests. By examining the microscopic interactions of publications and citations, our complex systems approach is able to identify the macroscopic patterns of a controversial concept's diffusion

Race/Ethnicity in Candidate Experiments:a Meta-Analysis and the Case for Shared Identification

Does race/ethnicity effect how voters assess political candidates? To address this question, we pooled data from 43 published candidate experiments from the last 10 years with a combined N of 305,632. We distinguish three different schools of thought that authors apply: unjust stereotypes, useful stereotypes and shared identification. Voters use “unjust stereotypes” and discriminate against candidates of color or use “useful stereotypes” that inform them of the policy positions they expect candidates to defend. Scholars increasingly apply a “shared identification” perspective and study the effect of congruence between voter and candidate characteristics on assessments. The results show that voters do not assess racial/ethnic minority candidates differently than their majority (white) counterparts. This does not hold for Asian candidates in the US: voters assess them slightly more positively than majority candidates, although this effect is small (0.76 percentage points). Shared identification matters enormously: when voters share the same race/ethnicity as a candidate they assess them 7.9 percentage points higher than that they assess majority candidates. This effect is substantively meaningful and significant for all most researched (US-based) races/ethnicities. This indicates that the underrepresentation of racial/ethnic minority citizens cannot be explained by voting behavior, but possibly by supply side effects