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Explaining motivation to represent: how does descriptive representation lead to substantive representation of racial and ethnic minorities? West European Politics.

The Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit was a major exercise in deliberative public engagement conducted in autumn 2017. It brought together fifty randomly selected members of the public for two carefully structured weekends of listening, learning, reflecting and discussing. Assembly members considered what post‐Brexit arrangements the UK should pursue, focusing on trade and migration. On trade, most members wanted the UK to pursue a bespoke arrangement with the EU and rejected the option of leaving the EU with no deal. On migration, most wanted the UK to maintain free movement of labour while using already available policy levers to reduce immigration numbers. These findings provide unique insight into informed public opinion on vital, pressing policy questions. The Assembly also illustrates the valuable role that such deliberative exercises could play in UK democracy. We suggest they could be particularly helpful for unlocking progress on issues such as the future of social care, that are often felt to be ‘too difficult’ to handle.

Northern Ireland has seen a rise in racially motivated crimes and incidents reported to police in recent years and, although this has been accompanied by intensified media coverage, this phenomenon has been the subject of relatively little research. The purpose of this study is to evaluate empirically three theories that have been proposed to explain prejudice towards ethnic minorities in Northern Ireland; economic self-interest, social contact, and 'sectarianism as racism'. Using the 2013 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, which contains new questions on contact with ethnic minorities, this study looks at attitudes towards Eastern Europeans, Muslims and a third category of 'other ethnic groups'. Results from multivariate linear regression provide evidence for all three theories but also show that the strength and significance of predictive variables for prejudice vary across the minority groups. The findings that there are different motivations for prejudice towards different groups can inform policies to tackle racism in Northern Ireland.