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This article examines why the political integration and representation of ethnic minority groups may develop along different paths. Taking Amsterdam as a case study, it compares two of the city’s most predominant immigrant groups: Turks, who have taken a group-based incorporation strategy – visible in this group’s dense organisational infrastructure – and Moroccans, who have followed a more individualist assimilation strategy. The distinct trajectories have produced a relatively high proportion of Turkish-origin elected officials, while individuals of Moroccan origin feature more prominently in executive office, exercising power over day-to-day decisions. The article proposes that whereas features of the electoral system determine which opportunities exist for immigrants to participate in the political process, it is the structure of an immigrant group that affects the ability of members to seize such opportunities. Furthermore, it shows how political parties and party elites act as gatekeepers and facilitators of immigrants’ political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Issue congruence between voters and parties can be achieved if voters and parties follow the party mandate model. A central requirement of this model is that parties fulfil their electoral mandate. This article studies collective party mandate fulfilment by comparing parties’ election manifestos with the parliamentary speeches of their politicians in two countries: a typical consensus democracy, the Netherlands, and a typical majoritarian democracy, the United Kingdom. The central question is whether a difference in collective mandate fulfilment exists between these two types of democracy. Contrary to previous findings, this study finds that such a difference does not exist, at least not with regard to the two countries analysed. This can be explained by the way in which the party mandate is conceptualised. The article also analyses the development of party mandate fulfilment over time and finds no evidence for the idea that collective mandate fulfilment is declining. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Can we meaningfully compare within a single theoretical framework the politics of interest representation in the European Union with its counterparts in the United States and other national political systems? We address this question by first considering several candidate explanations for the lack of broad-ranging comparative research on interest representation, focusing in the end on the problem of context. We then argue that much of the recent progress in the literature is a result more of segmentation of theoretical issues. The third section discusses how this successful strategy of segmentation has unfortunately raised new theoretical barriers to comparative analysis. This argument is explored by comparing work on organised interests in the EU with two other cases - the hyper-pluralistic interest politics of the United States and the neo-corporatist politics of the Netherlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]