Colorful or colorless? Local parties defending ethnic minority interests
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4335/16.3.413-430(2018)Keywords:
representation, ethnic minorities, local politics, Belgium, partiesAbstract
We investigate to what extent local political parties have attention for ethnic minority interests. We are interested in whether party-related or context-related variables lead to higher levels of attention to ethnic minority interests. Our analysis is based on a broad scale survey among local party chairs in Belgium. The results show that mainly party-related variables explain variance in attention for ethnic minority interests: leftist parties and active parties are more likely to defend these interests. The presence of ethnic minority people in a party does not have a significant effect once we control for factors at the municipality level.
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