Diversity in Spanish Politics? The Nomination of Immigrant-Origin Local Candidates and Dynamics of Descriptive Political Representation

The political representation of immigrant minorities has attracted increasing academic and political interest over the last few years. Yet, a rapidly growing body of scholarship points towards the alarming gap in the political representation of citizens of immigrant descent in European democracies. What are the factors that allow us to better understand the dynamics of these gaps in representation? Is a high concentration of immigrant origin minorities enough for them to gain political representation? Or are certain parties more prone to nominate specific immigrant origin candidates than others? What type of strategies, if any, do parties follow in the nomination of candidates of immigrant background? Using a unique dataset based on a large N survey conducted with local party organizations, this paper systematically compares the 2011 and 2015 Spanish local elections in municipalities counting with the highest shares of immigrant origin residents from five different groups: Romanians, Moroccans, Bulgarians, Latin Americans and EU15 mobile Europeans. It further examines how these factors -residential concentration, ethnicity, political opportunities and party competition- interact to lead to better or worse outcomes of descriptive political representation of these groups.