Social conflicts and dynamics of party competition in migration and integration policy (MigRep)

Project team:

Principal investigators: Prof. Dr. Andreas Blätte (InZentIM), Prof. Dr. Marc Debus (MZES), Prof. Dr. Susanne Pickel (InZentIM), Prof. Dr. Christian Stecker (MZES), Prof. Dr. Gökçe Yurdakul (BIM)

Project staff: Tunay Altay (HU Berlin, BIM), Laura Dinnebier (InZentIM), Noam Himmelrath (MZES), Dr. Inga Kravchik (BIM), Dennis Schüle (InZentIM), Seçkin Söylemez (InZentIM), Simone Tosson (InZentIM)

Former project members: Christoph Leonhardt (InZentIM)

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Project description:

The success of representative democracy depends on political representatives adequately representing the preferences of citizens (substantive representation) and on citizens perceiving this representation as satisfactory (subjective responsiveness). In this respect, political parties play a prominent role as mediators between society and the political system. With the politicisation of immigration in the course of the so-called "refugee crisis", their mediation performance and thus successful democratic representation is facing great challenges. The processing of social conflicts by party democracy has apparently become precarious: On the one hand, the views of citizens without a migration background have become more diverse and controversial. On the other hand, the political integration of immigrants demands that their distinct positions and demands for representation be taken up by political actors, i.e. by the parties.

In the light of these challenges to democracy, our research project investigates to what extent the positions and issue attention of political parties with regard to integration and migration reflect the diverse preferences of the population and what consequences result from possible representation gaps for the support of democracy and the configuration of the party system.

The research design is based on a differentiated concept of democratic representation, which we empirically examine with a multifaceted perspective on (autochthonous and allochthonous) citizens and political representatives. With the combined application of established (e.g. survey research) and new methods (computer-assisted text analysis/computational social science), we aim to achieve sufficient illumination of the complex object of investigation. Finally, our research results should help to better understand the political challenges of the immigration society in Germany and to address them through appropriate political action.

Research question: Do decisions and representations of the parties' migration policies correspond to the plural preferences of the population (with and without a migration background) and what consequences do congruencies and divergences in this respect have for their support for democracy?

Participating partners: Interdisciplinary Centre for Integration and Migration Research (InZentIM), Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration Research (BIM)

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Publications

Blätte, Andreas,  Dinnebier, Laura & Schmitz-Vardar, Merve (2023). Die prekäre Repräsentation von Vielfalt in den Konfliktlagen der Transformationsgesellschaft. in: Regieren in der Transformationsgesellschaft, Hrsg. Karl-Rudolf Korte, Philipp Richter und Arno von Schuckmann, 261–268. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41285-2_29

Debus, Marc, Himmelrath, Noam & Stecker, Christian (2023). How a history of migration 
affects individuals´ political attitudes. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 50(8). https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2023.2245571

Debus, Marc & Himmelrath, Noam (2024). Who Runs in the End? New Evidence on the 
Effects of Gender, Ethnicity and Intersectionality on Candidate Selection. Political Studies Review, 50(8). https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299241226616

Dinnebier, Laura, Tosson, Simone & Himmelrath, Noam (2023). Parteien, Politiker*innen, zivilgesellschaftliche Organisationen – durch wen fühlen sich Menschen mit und ohne Migrationshintergrund in Deutschland repräsentiert? DeZIMinutes #12 

Tosson, Simone & Pickel, Susanne (2022). Wählen unter pandemischen Bedingungen. Politische Unterstützung und Responsivität als Einflussfaktoren der Wahlabsicht. in: Die Bundestagswahl 2021. Hrsg. Karl-Rudolf Korte, Maximilian Schiffers, Arno von Schuckmann und Sandra Plümer, 1-25. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-35758-0_6-1

Tosson, Simone (2022). Zu wenig Diversität? Die Genese deskriptiver Unterrepräsentation bei der Landtagswahl 2022 in NRW. https://regierungsforschung.de/zu-wenig-diversitaet/