Metropolitan Parliamentary Representation
Name of applicant
Mette Marie Harder
Institution
Stockholm University
Amount
DKK 1,315,245
Year
2020
Type of grant
Reintegration Fellowships
What?
Located in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific primarily, periphery territories are areas that have some autonomy but are tied to a metropolitan power in such a way that they do not hold full local autonomy. In practice, their degree of autonomy varies: Some hold the integrated status of a special municipality within their metropole, while others only have a few areas - most generally foreign affairs and defense - decided within their metropole. Among other arenas, such decisions are deliberated within metropolitan parliaments. Through a comparative study of how the interests of people living in periphery territories are represented within their metropolitan parliaments, this project generates new knowledge about current periphery-metropole relations.
Why?
Though the way peripheries are represented within their metropolitan parliaments constitutes an important substantive and symbolic part of the metropole-periphery relation, not much is known about this. Especially, though comparative knowledge on this type of representation is highly needed to qualify scientific and political deliberation on present and future periphery-metropole relations globally there is a dearth of such knowledge. Besides overcoming this lack of knowledge, the spatial incoherence of metropolitan parliamentary representation constitutes a novel case within the literature on equal political representation. Thus, studying this "odd case" may further theoretic innovation within the area of representation theory.
How?
The project consists of a case study of the representation of Greenland in the Danish Parliament, Aruba, and Bonaire in the Dutch parliament, and Gibraltar in the British parliament. Here, representation in its formal, descriptive, substantive, and symbolic forms will be studied (Pitkin, 1967). The cases are chosen to provide for a study with formal institutional - and national - diversity and the study focuses on the past decade, thus including important events such as Hurricane Irma (2017), and periods following recent referendums on self-determination in Greenland (in 2009), and Bonaire (2010). The project employs elite in-depth interviews, together with content analysis of representative actions, and legal analysis.