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The Effect of Electoral Systems on Immigrant Representation

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The Effect of Electoral Systems on Immigrant Representation The Effect of Electoral Systems on Immigrant Representation Presented to the Department of Government in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree with honors of Bachelor of Arts Harvard College March 2016 Table of Contents 1. Introduction ......................................................................................................... 3 2. Representation, Incorporation, and Electoral Systems ..................................... 11 3. Mixed-Member Electoral Systems as a Quasi-Experiment .............................. 33 4. The Effect of Electoral Systems on Descriptive Representation ...................... 50 5. The Effect of Electoral Systems on Substantive Representation ...................... 84 6. In Search of Other Explanations: A Case Study of New Zealand’s Citizenship Amendment Act 2005 ......................................................................................... 109 7. Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 125 Works Cited ........................................................................................................ 129 2 1. Introduction In 2015, Germany accepted over one million refugees to a country in which 13% of its eighty million people were already foreign-born (Chambers 2015; OECD 2015: 312). German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been lauded for her response to the migrant crisis, winning TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2015. But one group’s voice has been notably absent from the conversation: immigrants. Fewer than three percent of Members of Parliament (MPs) in the current Bundestag were born outside of Germany and the debate over the refugee crisis focuses on Germany’s moral and political obligations and not on the desires of migrant communities. As immigration and immigrants become prominent political topics across the developed world, it is increasingly important to understand how political institutions shape the presence of immigrant voices in the polity. This thesis examines how a particularly powerful type of institution— electoral systems—affects immigrant representation. Electoral systems control who wins political office. Most often, this question of who is thought of in terms of parties. But electoral systems also change this who more literally, in terms of both demography and ideas. An extensive literature, discussed in Chapter 2, finds that proportional rules can help women and racial or ethnic minorities win office and have their voices heard. In Hanna Pitkin’s (1967) terminology, proportional rules help disadvantaged groups achieve descriptive and substantive representation. 3 Although women and ethnic minorities are well studied, few scholars tackle how electoral systems affect immigrants.1 Immigrants often face unique political challenges, making the importance of separate research crucial. Immigrants may not speak the majority language, may lack the same legal status as domestic minorities, and often face blatant xenophobia. Thus, it is by no means obvious that electoral systems should affect immigrants in the same ways that they affect other minorities. This thesis seeks to determine whether immigrants, like other disadvantaged groups, benefit from proportional arrangements or whether their relationship with electoral systems is somehow different. In a world of many political institutions, why study electoral systems in particular? In the words of Italian political scientist Giovanni Sartori (1968: 273), electoral systems are the “most specific manipulative instrument of politics.” Electoral systems, unlike party systems or constitutional principles, can be changed by voters and politicians and have a significant effect on voting behavior. Thus, determining the impact of electoral systems on major constituencies like immigrants is crucial. Because electoral reform occurs infrequently, it is particularly important for electoral engineers to fully understand the impact of the rules they are choosing and make well-informed decisions. However, the rarity of reform does not mean it is impossible or even improbable. Recent electoral reform in well-established 1 I consider a number of different markers of immigration background in my study, including birthplace and ethnic background. In general though, I use the term immigrants to refer to those born outside of the country, in keeping with the OECD’s (2015) practice. See Chapter 2 for more details on definitional considerations. 4 democracies from Italy to Israel and New Zealand to Japan proves that change is possible. An understanding of the full consequences of electoral systems is crucial for politicians both in established democracies considering institutional change and in new democracies picking institutions for the first time. Representation fostered through electoral reform can also be a crucial tool for bringing immigrant voices into the political arena. Political incorporation includes the capacity for “sustained claims making” (Hochschild et al. 2013: 16). By picking electoral rules that help enhance the political representation of immigrants, electoral engineers can help immigrants integrate into the political community and impact political issues that affect their lives. Thus, electoral systems are a crucial tool for understanding immigrant representation at a time when immigrants and immigration are hot button issues. The world’s two most common electoral systems are first-past-the-post (FPTP) and list proportional representation (PR) (Reynolds, Reilly, and Ellis 2005: 30). In FPTP, individual candidates compete in single-member districts (SMDs) and the one receiving the most votes in each district wins. List PR involves a series of multi-member districts (MMDs) in which voters select their preferred party. Seats in each district are then allocated to the parties proportional to their vote share. In the closed-list version of PR considered in this study, these seats are then filled by each party’s pre-ranked list of candidates. These two systems can have profoundly different effects. Maurice Duverger (1954, as formalized by Cox 1997) theorizes their best known difference: FPTP tends to lead to two-party competition on the district level while PR tends to lead 5 to many parties. As discussed in Chapter 2, a great deal of scholarship also considers how these two systems affect the election and representation of women and minorities. However, one of the largest challenges these studies run into is the risk of endogeneity. Countries that are more open to the voices of women and minorities might tend towards certain institutional choices. Specifically, countries that value minority voices might also select proportional representation, which electoral systems experts consider more inclusive (Reynolds, Reilly, and Ellis 2005: 57). Thus, countries that use PR might exhibit enhanced representation of women and minorities not because PR led to more inclusion, but because the countries’ inclusive attitudes led them to select PR in the first place. In extending electoral systems literature to immigrants, this study seeks to avoid the challenge of endogeneity by employing the mixed-member comparison method pioneered by Robert Moser and his co-authors (1997; 2001; 2004; 2008; 2012). Some countries elect their legislatures via a mix of FPTP and PR. Moser and his colleagues argue that this allows for a controlled comparison of how different rules function in the same country at the same time. My study uses this method to compare the representation of immigrants within New Zealand and Germany under both sets of rules. New Zealand and Germany are the only two established democracies that use this system and have sufficient foreign-born MPs in their legislatures to permit a study. The New Zealand and German populations are also 28 and 13% foreign-born respectively (OECD 2015: 312), making immigrants a sizable constituency in both countries. New Zealand’s immigrant population is on the rise, increasing from 19 to 28% of the total population between 2003 and 2013 6 while the German immigrant population has been steady at 13% during this same period (OECD 2015: 312). These cases therefore also represent immigrant representation in a country where the immigrant population is growing and one where it is stagnant. This study considers two main types of representation: descriptive and substantive (as defined by Pitkin 1967). Descriptive representation involves the election of representatives that share a demographic trait with certain constituents. Female MPs descriptively represent women, black MPs descriptively represent black constituents, and so on. For my purposes, descriptive representation means the election of greater shares of immigrants to the German Bundestag and New Zealand House of Representatives, the main legislative bodies in both countries. Substantive representation involves advocacy by legislators for a particular group, regardless of their personal demographic traits. A white legislator supporting issues favored by his minority constituents substantively represents the minority’s interests, even if he cannot descriptively represent them. I consider substantive representation in the form of parliamentary questions for oral answer asked in the New Zealand Parliament. I focus solely on New Zealand for substantive representation due to a lack of German language skills and to limit the scope of my study. The Argument Ultimately, this thesis seeks to determine which set of electoral rules, FPTP or closed-list PR, leads
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