The Influence of the Ethnic Composition of Australian Federal Electorates on the Parliamentary Responsiveness of MPs to their Ethnic Sub-constituencies

This paper examines the parliamentary responsiveness of Australian MPs with respect to their ethnic constituents in the official arena of representation, the federal parliament. It first reviews the notion of representation and discusses the twofold influence that ethnicity may exert on the representational behaviour of elected representatives: the ethnicity of the electorate and the ethnicity of the elected representative. It then presents and discusses the results of a content analysis of the parliamentary interventions of MPs from 12 ethnic electorates and 10 non-ethnic electorates between 1983 and 1996. On the basis of this analysis, two indexes were constructed, the ethnic reference ratio and the ethnic distance ratio in order to compare the responsiveness of MPs to their ethnic constituents. The findings suggest that the ethnicity of the electorate does have an influence on ethnic responsiveness in absolute terms but less so in relative terms. In other words, MPs from ethnic electorates generally make more ethnic-related interventions than MPs from non-ethnic electorates, but not as much as the proportion of ethnic constituents in these electorates would suggest they should make. The ethnicity of the electorate also influences the types of ethnic issues MPs make, with those from ethnic seats more likely to make constituency-related issues. The marginality of the seat, especially in ethnic electorates, rather than the political party to which the representative belongs, would appear to have a bigger influence on the degree and type of responsiveness. Finally, the ethnicity of the MP does have an influence in both the degree and type of ethnic responsiveness.