Liza Mügge (née Liza Nell) is assistant professor in Gender & Ethnicity. During the academic year 2014-2015 she is fellow with the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) at the Harvard Kennedy School. She was visiting scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University (January-June 2012) and is faculty affiliate of the  Center for Research on Gender in the Professions at the University of California, San Diego. She is also associate director of the Amsterdam Research Center for Gender and Sexuality (ARC-GS) and co-convenor of the Standing Group Gender & Politics of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR).

In the summer of 2013 Liza has received a three-year Veni-research grant from the NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research). This project focuses on the gendered political representation of ethnic minorities in Dutch politics (see the second tab for the project abstract). In addition, she is an affiliated researcher of the Open Research Area-funded project Pathways to Power: The Political Representation of Citizens of Immigrant Origin in Seven European Democracies (PATHWAYS).

Liza serves on the board of the Stichting fonds Catharina van Tussenbroek (a foundation to support international mobility of early career female researchers) and the program board of the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies (IMES). She is editorial advisory board member of Migration Letters and editorial review board member of Kurdish Studies. Liza regularly blogs about political representation, gender in the profession and gender equality for the political science blog Stuk Rood Vlees.

Expertise and research interests

·         Political Representation

·         Gender/Ethnicity/Intersectionality and Politics

·         Transnationalism and Diaspora Politics

·         Qualitative Methodology and Mixed Methods 

Memberships

• AISSR research programme 'Challenges to Democratic Representations'
• American Political Science Association (APSA)
• European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR)

Teaching

Academic year 2014-2015

Coordinator of the Minor Gender & Sexuality

Democratic societies view the representation of identifiable groups in parliament as a key means to give these groups political voice and to legitimize governance. While the parliamentary underrepresentation of both women and ethnic minorities has received considerable attention, much of this work has treated women and ethnic minorities as internally homogenous and conceptually separate groups. Once we acknowledge that people have both a gender and an ethnicity, hitherto unstudied questions arise:

1) Which ethnic minority citizens enter parliament and why? For example, from 1998 to 2010, 80% of all ethnic minority members of parliament (MPs) in the Netherlands were women. In contrast to prevailing assumptions, the intersection of two marginalized identities does not automatically create ‘double marginalization’.

2) How does the intersection of gender and ethnicity influence what ethnic minority politicians promise to do for their ‘own’ group and what they do once they are elected? For example, do female ethnic minority MPs (claim to) act on behalf of all Dutch citizens, all women, a specific ethnic minority, or only the women within it?

3) How and why do members of the native majority (claim to) represent ethnic minority interests, and how is this gendered? For example, conservative, male native-Dutch politicians often claim to defend the interests of female immigrants.

By pursuing these questions in the Netherlands, this project aims to understand political inclusion and exclusion based on the interaction of gender and ethnicity. The project will draw on interviews with ethnic minority MPs, leaders of immigrant and women’s organizations and political parties, and content analysis of political campaigns and policy agendas. Diachronic comparison covering the eight parliamentary sessions since the election of the first ethnic minority MP in 1986 will reveal how institutional and contextual factors affect representation, in particular the backlashes against multiculturalism and feminism since the 1990s.

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