Ethnic Diversity in Local Government, 2018-2019

This project is the first census of all local councillors in all 4 constitutive nations of the UK, conducted in 2018 and 2019. The local level, so important to our democracy, is too often ignored, and political representation is predominantly studied at the national level. The particular importance of local level to ethnic representation cannot be overstated as it is often the first step in politics and political careers for many minority politicians, and a first line of contact for minority individuals and communities in need of help. This project seeks to fill this research gap and to put local representation at the heart of studying how ethnic minorities are politically represented in Britain. Our research design was developed to study the experiences of ethnic minority local councillors from visibly racialised backgrounds of both genders, to further our understandings of the mechanisms that underpin representational inequalities. We collected the ethnicity, gender and political party of every local councillor in the UK by referring to council websites. We sought to sample our interviewees to reflect a range of non-white backgrounds and political experience as well as gender balance. Interviewees were asked about how they became involved in local politics, their views on the extent of demand for greater diversity in local government and their experiences of running for selection and election for local government as well as serving as a local councillor. The collection consists of interview transcripts with 95 ethnic minority local councillors, candidates and activists, or white British councillors in local government leadership positions.

Understandings of ethnic inequalities in the UK have developed substantially as a result of the work of The Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE). CoDE has successfully carried out an innovative programme of research, pursued challenging scientific objectives, and worked closely with a range of non-academic partners to impact on policy debates and development. In a rapidly evolving political and policy context, we propose a further, ambitious programme of work that takes us in new directions with a distinct focus. We will move beyond nuanced description to understanding processes and causes of ethnic inequalities, and build directly on our established experience in interdisciplinary and mixed methods working. In addition, we will use a co-production approach, working with a range of partners, including key public institutions such as the BBC, universities, political parties, ethnic minority NGOs, activists, and individuals, in order to frame and carry out our research in ways that will maximise our societal impact and lead to meaningful change. Our overarching objectives are to: -Understand how ethnic inequalities develop in a range of interconnected domains -Examine how these processes relate to and are shaped by other social categories, such as gender, class, religion and generation -Understand how ethnic inequalities take shape, and are embedded, in institutional spaces and practices -Work closely with policy and practice partners to meaningfully address enduring ethnic inequalities -Pursue methodological developments with interdisciplinary mixed methods and co-production at their core -Achieve ongoing high quality international academic impact Through a research plan divided into four work packages, we will examine ethnic inequalities in (1) higher education, (2) cultural production and consumption, (3) politics, representation and political parties and (4) pursue policy and institutional impact with our work in these areas. Alongside this, we are also conducting a programme of work on severe mental illness. These work packages will be organised around our ambition to understand, explain and impact on ethnic inequalities through a focus on institutional production of and responses to ethnic inequalities. At the core of our methodological approach is interdisciplinary and mixed methods working. Our quantitative work will be predominantly secondary data analysis, making the best use of the wide range of resources in the UK (e.g. Understanding Society, Destination of Leavers of Higher Education Survey, British Election Study, ONS Longitudinal Studies). Our qualitative work will be based around ethnographic approaches that are attentive to the ways in which social processes play out differently in different sites and institutions. We are informed especially by the approach of institutional ethnography which prioritises an attention to the lived, everyday experience of inequality, but aims to clarify the wider social relations in which such experiences are embedded and by which they are shaped. Thus institutional ethnographies will be developed which begin with exploring the experience of those directly involved in institutional settings as a route to understanding how structures and practices of institutions shape individuals' experiences and practices. Throughout our work we will integrate and mobilise research evidence to engage with a full range of partners in order to influence policy and practice development, public understanding and institutional practice. As well as having academic impact (journal articles, conferences, seminars, newsletters), our findings will be communicated directly to policy and advocacy organisations through a combination of well developed (blogs, Twitter, policy briefings) and emerging (podcasts and live streaming, museum and art exhibitions, online portal for individual narratives) forms of dissemination, and we will work directly with these organisations to achieve change.

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