Liza Mügge

University of Amsterdam | UVA · Department of Political Science

Historically, trans people have been excluded from politics. Despite political under representation, trans interests increasingly appear on the political agenda in the Netherlands and Germany. In 2021, trans women were elected to the Dutch and German parliaments for the first time. However, increased trans visibility is accompanied by backlash and...

The maiden speech – the first speech given by a newly elected member of parliament (MP) – is a tradition in many parliaments, a personalized rite of passage to political power. As ethnic minority MPs remain relative newcomers, the maiden speech is, for them, even more politically charged. How do ethnic minority MPs represent their identities in thi...

Does race/ethnicity effect how voters assess political candidates? To address this question, we pooled data from 43 published candidate experiments from the last 10 years with a combined N of 305,632. We distinguish three different schools of thought that authors apply: unjust stereotypes, useful stereotypes and shared identification. Voters use “u...

How do the media describe the intersectional identities of elected politicians? Our study focuses on parliamentarians in the Netherlands who fall outside the prevailing norm in politics: women and female and male ethnic minorities. Drawing on 2,783 newspaper articles published between 1994 and 2012 and matched samples, we find that the media struct...

Although international proclamations increasingly recognize legal sex beyond binary categories, domestic legislation is lagging behind. Germany and the Netherlands are the first countries in Western Europe where courts have ruled in favour of a third option. While the German constitution was amended to guarantee a third option, the Dutch government...

Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989 as a critique of feminist and critical race scholarship's neglect of—respectively—race and gender. Since then, the concept has been interpreted and reinterpreted to appeal to new disciplinary, geographical, and sociocultural audiences, generating heated debates over its appropriation and...

AN INTERDISCIPLINARY AND INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE: AN INTERVIEW WITH LIZA MÜGGE - Volume 53 Issue 2 - Sanne van Oosten, Liza Mügge

Whether there is a trade-off between ‘here’ (country of settlement) and ‘there’ (the country of origin) is one of the key political questions and concerns regarding political attitudes and behaviors of immigrant minorities. We take this issue by the horns and study three components of political attitudes and behavior within a transnational framewor...

Ethnic minority women tend to be better represented in parliaments than ethnic minority men. What does this mean for their substantive representation? This article makes use of intersectional analysis to study how the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation differs within and between gender and ethnic groups. Drawing on writ...

Since its coinage in the 1980s, intersectionality has journeyed across borders and disciplines, which is a testament to its resonance. We examine how intersectionality has travelled within political science and the potential impact that this has had on its political project, with particular attention to the politics of knowledge production. The ana...

Presence, of bodies and ideas, is often taken as the primary indicator of political equality and, hence, democratic health. Intersectionality and constructivism question the validity of measuring presence. Turning theory into practice, we propose a comparative reflexive design guided by two research questions: (1) Who are the groups? and (2) What a...

Newspaper data are popular in Comparative Migration Studies as they allow diachronic and cross-national comparison and are relatively easy and inexpensive to acquire. Critics, however, warn that newspaper data are hampered by selection, description and researcher bias. This article argues that research drawing on newspaper data can be improved by e...

Abstract In this special issue, we evaluate the integration of gender in academic education in the Netherlands, focusing mostly on disciplinary study programmes. We show that while gender has become a permanent feature of Dutch academic teaching, there are substantial differences between disciplines and universities. We observe that the integration...

Abstract Over the past decades, gender and politics has become a vibrant and recognised international research field. Scholars have shown that gender is central to politics. Gendered equalities and inequalities are shaped and reproduced in political processes and institutions. In this article, we examine to what extent gender perspectives and insig...

This article aims to contribute to explanations why ethnic minority women outnumber ethnic minority men in national parliaments of European immigration countries. Extending the intersectional lens it asks: which ethnic minority candidates are recruited and selected? Drawing on nine elections (1986–2012) in the Netherlands, I find that the success o...

This special issue revisits traditional group-based approaches to political representation by examining how multiple advantages and disadvantages interact and multiply in specific settings. The contributions examine how intersections of age, religion, gender, sexuality, ability, nationality, generation and ethnicity influence entrance to elected of...

Major changes have occurred in the teaching of gender since the shift from women’s studies to gender studies. In some institutions gender studies became a separate and interdisciplinary track within social sciences and humanities, while in others it either lacked integration or disappeared altogether. What do these developments mean for gender in p...

What have been the losses and the gains of the shift from women’s studies to gender studies for political science in The Netherlands? What are present-day opportunities and how should we move forward? Our systematic analysis of the Bachelor programmes offered by four Dutch political science departments shows that gender is not a central feature in...

This chapter reviews the state of the art of scholarship on the transnationalism-integration nexus. It examines the view emanating from the existing literature on the relation between immigrants’ transnational activities and ties to the country of origin, on the one hand, and “integration” in the receiving country, on the other. The review is guide...

Gender is essential for the understanding of politics in all its diversity. Concepts of democracy and peace, themes of race and inclusion, or methodology are better understood through a gender lens. Therefore, we need to utilize a gender in our teaching across the discipline. This symposium provides accounts of how scholars demonstrate rich pedagog...

Feminist scholars have developed a solid research agenda on gender equality in politics. This scholarship is built on the conviction that equitable representation of men and women is fundamental to the functioning of representative democracies (Mansbridge 1999; Norris and Lovenduski 1995). In order to comply with the intersectional research paradig...

Some immigrants are problematized, while others are not. As categories form the backbone of policies, they formally define (i) who is a wanted and who is an unwanted immigrant and (ii) who requires integration and who does not. Gender studies and migration and ethnic studies show how categories both construct and reproduce inequality. We argue that...

Although scholarship on the general ideological orientation of right-wing populist parties is well established, few scholars have studied their ideas about gender. De Lange and Mügge therefore ask how differences in ideology shape right-wing populist parties' ideas on gender. Drawing on the qualitative content analysis of party manifestos, they com...

Turkey's European Union (EU) negotiations are generally believed to positively affect the rights of ethnic minorities in Turkey. Through a detailed case study, this article examines how members of the Kurdish diaspora in Europe aim to influence this process through lobbying, and to what extent ‘Europeanization’ is channelling the organisation and s...

Gender equality is not fully realised when it is restricted to ethnic majority men and women. This article examines how gender quotas as a form of equality policy affect ethnic minority groups, in particular, the gender balance among ethnic minority candidates for political office. Our analysis focuses on the selection of ethnic minority candidates...

Gender equality has become a core element within the national identity and self representation of ‘progressive’ European nation states, distinguishing them from what is deemed non-European. Gender equality has become the hallmark of what ‘Europe’ stands for. But gender equality is far from one dimensional; its politics are murky. This special issue...

This research note focuses on the intersection of gender, sexuality, and age relations with gatekeepers by concentrating on explicit and implicit forms of sexual harassment and intimidation by male gatekeepers toward the author, a female researcher. Comparing fieldwork experiences in radically different cultural settings (Turkey and Surinam) shows...

This Dialogues section brings together research from two hitherto separate interdisciplinary strands of European scholarship on politics: Gender Studies, and Migration and Ethnic Studies. Combining theories, concepts, methods, and findings, the papers demonstrate what each field can learn from the other. By exploring various forms of citizenship an...

Why do some sending states encourage continued emigrant involvement whereas others do not? And to what extent does sending-state transnationalism lead to a redefinition of borders? Although research on sending-state transnationalism is flourishing, so far it only covers the positive cases and remains silent on states inactive in this respect. This...

This article studies the conceptions of social justice of women active in transnational migrant politics over a period of roughly 20 years in the Netherlands. The novel focus on migrant women reveals that transnational politics is almost completely male dominated and directed. Two of the exceptions found in this article include a leftist and a Kurd...

This article focuses on two migrant groups in the Netherlands, one in which the majority is naturalised (Surinamese) and one in which the majority has dual nationality (Turks and Kurdish-Turks). It explores the impact of home and host states’ citizenship regimes on: (1) the citizenship choices of individual migrants; (2) their (trans)national polit...

This study of Surinamese organizational networks in the Netherlands examines how ethnic and religious diversity among migrants from the same “homeland” influences their transnational involvement on the collective -- that is, associational -- level. Taken together, ethnic and religious diversity were found to generate lowly institutionalized transna...

Despite widespread scepticism in receiving societies, migrants often remain loyal to their former homeland and stay active in the politics there. Beyond Dutch Borders is about such ties. Combining extensive fieldwork with quantitative data, this book compares how transnational political involvement among guest workers from Turkey and post-colonial...

This article examines evolution of migrants’ organisational transnational ties with political parties of the Turkish radical left in the Netherlands since the 1970s. It shows that trajectories of transnationally orientated migrant organisations with a shared political orientation differ substantially from each other. Some lose their radical edge ov...

Abstract In this article we question a central trope of transnationalism and new media – deterritorialization – and its application to border crossing Internet usage by Iranian and Turkish-Kurdish migrants in the Netherlands. Their Internet usage indicates the extent to which territoriality channels these groups' online practice. We found Dutch-Ira...

Under which circumstances do immigrant transnational political activities emerge into a sustainable transnational community? First, this depends on the transnational political opportunity structure (TPOS) including both immigrant’s country of settlement and the (ancestral) country of origin. Governments’ integration and emigration models – that pol...