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13 Rev. Eur. Stud. 32 (2021)
Intersectional Representation between Gender, Religion, and Nationality

handle is hein.journals/rveurost13 and id is 385 raw text is: Review of European Studies; Vol. 13, No.4; 2021 ISSN 1918-7173 E-ISSN 1918-7181 Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education Intersectional Representation Between Gender, Religion, and Nationality Osnat Akirav Correspondence: The Department of Political Science, Western Galilee College, Akko, Israel Received: October 12, 2021 Accepted: November 5, 2021 Online Published: November 15, 2021 doi:10.5539/res.v13n4p32 URL: https://doi.org/10.5539/res.v13n4p32 Abstract Immigrants who came to Europe in recent decades (work immigrants and/or refugees) grapple with intersectional identities, such as religion, nationality and gender, yet current political research addresses these issues only in part. To address these omissions, I conducted a content analysis of all parliamentary questions Muslim representatives raised in their parliamentary activities in three Western countries. I also investigated whether the representatives' invisibility pertains only to their descriptive representation or whether it affects their substantive representation by analyzing five research hypotheses for differences in the content of the parliamentary questions. I found that male and female Muslim representatives ask parliamentary questions about Muslim men and women. In addition, I developed an Intersectional Representation Index to measure and demonstrate the complexities Muslim representatives face in Western countries. The index shows that such representatives have several identities, some of which have become invisible, as previous studies indicated. Keywords: descriptive and substantive representation, intersectional representation, male and female Muslim representatives 1. Introduction Scholars have argued that little research attention has been given to the political representation of Muslim minority women in the West (Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach 2008; Ruedin 2013; Hughes 2016). Furthermore, most of the existing research concentrates on descriptive representations of Muslim women, thereby ignoring two components of the concept of representation: 1) the issue of gender regarding Muslim representatives and 2) the substantive representation of both Muslim men and women. Immigrants who came to Europe in recent decades (work immigrants and/or refugees) grapple with multiple identities, such as religion, nationality, tradition, and gender, yet current political research addresses these issues only in part. Analyzing just one or two identities, as previous studies did, might provide just a partial picture of the challenges representatives who have intersectional identities face. My goal is to combine these different identities into one overall concept of intersectional representation by discussing how each identity is reflected in the content of parliamentary questions that male and female Muslim representatives ask. I also examine when some identities disappear and others move to the forefront. I maintain that intersectional representation leads to greater invisibility among representatives who belong to several disadvantaged groups and have several identities, compared with those who belong to only one disadvantaged group. Furthermore, I compare the Muslim representatives in the UK, Germany, and Israel. In the first countries, all the representatives are immigrants or the children of immigrants. However, in Israel, all the Muslim representatives are native-born Israelis. My results indicate that while Muslim representatives in Israel are more coherent regarding their Muslim identity, Muslim representatives in Germany and the UK address religious issues in their parliamentary questions but have other identities to represent as well. Furthermore, Muslim women's issues are generally invisible in the UK and Germany, whereas in Israel they are addressed more often. There are just a few other related papers that use data on the same legislative mechanism--parliamentary questions--(Saalfeld 2011; Saalfeld and Bischof 2012; Kolpinskaya 2017) to study the same area -- religion in politics (Saalfeld 2011; Saalfeld and Bischof 2012; Kolpinskaya 2017). However, all of them analyzed only one country -- the UK. Furthermore, they did not address the main issue of intersectional representation. Thus, my analysis contributes to the literature by adding two more countries (Germany and Israel), and gender as an additional identity along with religion to the analysis and the concept of intersectional representation. The previous studies explored whether the growing descriptive representation of ethnic minority representatives in the UK parliament has any implications for the substantive representation of minority-related issues in the UK Parliament (Saalfeld 2011). They mapped and explained variations in the extent to which Black, Asian and ethnic minority representatives use written parliamentary questions to articulate issues relevant to minority constituents (Saalfeld and Bischof 2012). They also investigated the factors that drive UK 32

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