Walking multiple tightropes: how minoritized members of parliament navigate ascribed identities

Although racialized and ethnic minoritized groups are increasingly represented in parliaments around the world, political parties and constituencies often ascribe fixed identities to these elected officials and expect them to behave accordingly. Constituents often expect “their” minoritized MPs to serve as role models and express disappointment when they seem too beholden to established interests. For their part, political parties demand that minoritized MPs embody “diversity” while simultaneously pressuring them to conform to dominant norms of political behavior. MPs are electorally rewarded or penalized based on how they perform their ascribed identities. Focusing on the Netherlands, our study draws on thirty-seven in-depth interviews with minoritized MPs who served in the Dutch parliament between 1986 and 2024. The sample includes men and women from various generations and from across the political spectrum. Applying insights from psychology to the study of political representation, we introduce the concept of “multiple tightropes” to analyze how minoritized MPs juggle the challenges of stereotyping, tokenism, and hypervisibility. Our typology of four at times overlapping strategies – “Fitting in”, “Strategizing difference”, “Resistance” and “Reframing” – extends our understanding beyond descriptive and substantive representation to include how minoritized MPs experience externally imposed labels and navigate politics as perceived “Others”.