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We are grateful for helpful comments from Claire Adida, Michael Donnelly, Romain Ferrali, Gunnar Myrberg, Matt Wright, the editors and anonymous reviewers at the American Political Science Review, and seminar participants at Dartmouth College, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Uppsala University, the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, and the Norwegian Business School. This research was financially supported by The Swedish Research Council, Uppsala Center for Labor Studies, and Uppsala Forum on Democracy, Peace and Justice.
INTRODUCTION
Immigrants are severely underrepresented in city halls and national parliaments around the world. In most European countries and even in traditional immigration destinations like the United States, Canada, and Australia, parity ratios--the share of immigrants who hold elected office divided by their share in the population--fall well below 1 (Bloemraad 2013). This lack of descriptive representation occurs even though immigrants have settled in advanced democracies for several decades and have done so in great numbers. In many advanced industrialized democracies the foreign-born now constitute well over 10 percent of the population.
The fact that substantial parts of the population face barriers when seeking to enter electoral politics poses deep challenges to democratic practice and norms. Minority representatives often articulate the interests of minority constituents, and, in doing so, introduce perspectives to deliberative decision-making processes that would otherwise remain ignored (e.g., Gutmann and Thompson 2004, Karpowitz et al. 2012, Mansbridge 1999, Tate 2003). The presence of minority representatives can also lessen minority groups' sense of marginalization. Descriptive representation can signal that the political system is inclusive of minority voices and, further, that the majority society accepts or even welcomes diversity (e.g., Bloemraad 2013, Chauchard 2014, Mansbridge 1999, Phillips 1995).
Finally, and most dramatically, it has been argued that the political exclusion of immigrant-origin minorities has contributed to riots, as politically marginalized immigrant groups in France, Belgium, Great Britain, and elsewhere have taken their grievances to the streets (Bleich et al. 2010; Dancygier 2010). A recent example of such disturbances occurred in Sweden, where the foreign-born constitute 15 percent of the population. The riots erupted in Stockholm's suburbs and subsequently spread to immigrant neighborhoods in other towns. One of the chief reasons attributed to immigrants' discontent is the inequality...