The central concern of this article is the extent of political party commitments to the inclusion of ethnic minorities. The study of two Belgian cities and four parties shows a marked discrepancy between the efforts to include ethnic minority candidates and their level of inclusion in the local party structures as individual members, as party officials or as a party subdivision. A possible explanation is that political parties only promote the representation of ethnic minorities out of concern for their own electoral competitiveness, and not based on an unconditional commitment to the full political integration of ethnic minorities. About the AuthorsKaren Celis is Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Political Science of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium). She conducts theoretical and empirical research (qualitative, comparative) on political representation of groups (women, ethnic minorities, class, age groups, LGBT), equality policies and state feminism. Karen Celis, Vrije universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 5 -room 2.69, Notes 1 Empirical studies testing whether the (increased) presence in parliaments of specific groups, for example women, increases the group's substantive representation show, however, mixed results. For an overview and critical discussion see Celis, 2008. 2 In the literature about ethnic minorities, two main traditions are present concerning ethnic statistics. On the one hand, ethnicity can be identified by using objective criteria like nationality, country of origin, etc. On the other hand, ethnicity can also be defined by means of self-identification. This research joins the first tradition.3 The data were gathered in May 2011.We would like to thank our research assistant Magalie Verstraeten for gathering these data and bringing them together in electronic files.

The scholarly literature on ethnic minority representation often points to the "political opportunity structure" -particularly that of political parties -to explain the prevalence of ethnic minorities in elected politics. Informed by the literature on women in politics, this article examines how the ideology of political parties affects the representation of ethnic minorities. This article is based on a qualitative case study of 2 major Belgian cities and includes 33 semi-structured interviews with ethnic minority councillors, candidates, members of ethnic communities, and party representatives. Interviews were analyzed using the grounded theory approach. We found party ideology to affect the support parties received from ethnic minority voters and candidates; party ideology does not, however, influence party strategies to enhance ethnic minority representation. Overall, political parties do not seem to invest in their ethnic minority candidates and councillors.

We investigate to what extent local political parties have attention for ethnic minority interests. We are interested in whether party-related or context-related variables lead to higher levels of attention to ethnic minority interests. Our analysis is based on a broad scale survey among local party chairs in Belgium. The results show that mainly party-related variables explain variance in attention for ethnic minority interests: leftist parties and active parties are more likely to defend these interests. The presence of ethnic minority people in a party does not have a significant effect once we control for factors at the municipality level.