Representation and Legitimacy: Diffuse Support and Descriptive Representation in Westminster Democracies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis asks the question: does the descriptive representation of ethnic minorities in legislatures affect citizens' diffuse support for the regime? While almost every advanced democracy has become more ethnically diverse through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, ethnic minorities and members of overseas-born communities are dramatically underrepresented compared to their presence in the general population. Democratic theory argues that if a group - especially one that is growing so rapidly - has few legislative representatives, their preferences risk being overlooked while jeopardizing the legitimacy of the representative system. Descriptive representation takes place when a representative shares the same race, ethnicity, or gender as their constituents. Arguments in favour of increased descriptive representation are broadly made on three grounds: justice and fairness, the substantive representation of 'minority interests', and increasing the legitimacy of the political system. The first two arguments - justice and substantive representation - have been widely explored. However, despite compelling theoretical evidence, the claim that representation makes political institutions more legitimate in the eyes of their citizenry has been subject to little empirical scrutiny. Using cross-sectional data from the Canadian, Australian and British election studies and data from an original conjoint experiment, the study examines how the descriptive representation of ethnic minorities affects voters' diffuse support for the regime, operationalised as perceptions of government responsiveness. The results show that: (1) candidate-level co-ethnic representation alone is not enough to increase the diffuse support of ethnic minority voters; (2) in some instances, legislator-level descriptive representation does make ethnic minority voters feel like government is more responsive to their demands; (3) certain behavioural and attitudinal factors - such as community-level mobilization and an explicit preference for descriptive representation - moderate the relationship between representation and diffuse support (4) substantive representation, operationalized through partisanship and ideology, may matter more than descriptive representation; and (5) a significant number of white-Anglo voters are threatened by ethnic minority representation in parliament. This study contributes to the advancement of knowledge through an empirical test of a commonly held-assumption: that representation matters for legitimacy. While the findings of this study broadly support this conclusion, they also show evidence of the tension between striving to make institutions more representative and essentialist approaches which assume the most important thing about ethnic minority politicians, voters and the relationship between them, is ethnicity. The findings also inform policy debates about the reform of representative institutions and how the representation of historically excluded groups may relate to our emerging understanding of white identity politics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".