Minority Politics In Multi-Racial Democracies

30 Pages 7544 Words

In light of the long histories of racial violence, discrimination, and organized protest by
racial and ethnic minority groups in established democratic states, it has become increasingly
imperative to examine how minority groups can achieve greater voice in the regular channels of
the democratic process. The growing literature on minority group politics focuses chiefly on
group politics at the level of the “grassroots.” The question is how do racial and ethnic minorities
achieve a critical mass, win numerical representation, and realize their policy goals (Browning,
Marshall and Tabb 1984; Hero 1992; Tate 1993; Leighley 2000)? While clearly the numbers,
leadership, organization, tactics, and group cohesion are important factors in minority political
empowerment, external factors, including the electoral-institutional structure, in which groups
operate are equally critical. Our goal is to determine the process through which minority groups
win political incorporation in established democracies. How have minorities been integrated into
the political parties and how has their incorporation taken place? Essentially, we seek to
examine the ways in which minorities have pressed for more representation, and how democratic
party systems have responded to such demands.
Political minorities are broadly defined as groups that are subjected to social, political,
and economic discrimination in society. A narrow definition of a political minority group is one
that has been subjected historically to legally different standards. This latter, narrower definition
would include women as representing a political minority. We contend that the numerical, or
descriptive, representation of minorities is important to the quality of the democratic process. Yet
this assumption has been a continuing source of debate amongst political theorists. In her seminal
book, The Concept of Representation, Hannah Pitkin (1967) contends that representa...