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Intersectional candidate nomination: how district and party factors shape the inclusion of ethnic minority men and women in Brussels

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Abstract

While it is axiomatic to note how ethnic minorities and women are both politically underrepresented in Western Europe, the interaction between ethnicity and gender in candidate nomination is seldom articulated. Some suggest that ethnic minority men fare better in the nomination process, while others indicate that ethnic minority women experience a ‘complementarity advantage’ over minority men. This article examines the experiences of Maghrebian-origin male and female candidates by exploring the conditionality of their respective advantages in Brussels local elections. More precisely, we show how contextual factors known to influence the nomination of ethnic minorities in particular parties and districts generate gendered outcomes. Our results show that the Maghrebian concentration in the district, shapes parties’ strategies, and influences the gender imbalance among Maghrebian-origin candidates. We find that men are numerically better represented on socialist, green, and liberal candidate lists in ethnically dense districts. However, Maghrebian-origin women are more likely than their male counterparts to receive visible list positions, regardless of the demographic context. Our findings confirm the conditionality of the so-called ‘complementarity’ advantage for minority women and highlight how contextual factors shape party nomination strategies and generate gendered outcomes for ethnic minority candidates.

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Notes

  1. Part of the list votes is allocated to candidates (in the list order, and until there are no list votes left) in order for them to reach an eligibility threshold. In Brussels local elections, almost all the candidates who benefit from the list votes devolution and who get elected would have been elected based on their personal score anyway, i.e., even without the list votes devolution, because the eligibility threshold is higher for those elections compared to other elections. Therefore, all list votes are usually allocated to the first candidates on the list, who are the candidates who already receive more preference votes anyway.

  2. Official elections websites: https://elections2006.brussels/, https://bruxelleselections2012.irisnet.be/, https://elections2018.brussels/.

  3. In this sense, we measure ‘visible list positions’ rather than ‘relative list positions’ which have been used in similar studies of the German system (Geese and Schacht 2019).

  4. This category only includes French-speaking regionalist lists (FDF/DéFi). Lists from the Flemish regionalist party N-VA are included in the “other lists” category for methodological purposes.

  5. Not all local party lists run under the national party banner. Steyvers et al. (2008) distinguish between national, pseudo-local, and local lists. The first two refer to lists that either directly invoke the national party or that hint at the national party although they do not bear the same name. Local parties do not have a counterpart at the national level and only exist at the local level.

  6. Data for 2012 were not available.

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Acknowledgement

We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. We thank Fraser King for editing this manuscript. The funding was provided by Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (G026617N).

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  1. Department of Political Science, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 5, Elsene, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Chloé Janssen, Silvia Erzeel & Karen Celis

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  1. Chloé Janssen
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  2. Silvia Erzeel
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  3. Karen Celis
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Correspondence to Chloé Janssen.

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Janssen, C., Erzeel, S. & Celis, K. Intersectional candidate nomination: how district and party factors shape the inclusion of ethnic minority men and women in Brussels. Acta Polit 56, 567–586 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-020-00167-3

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