The big men are rising! The case of migrants participation in district council elections in The Netherlands

Abstract

For the first time in the Netherlands, immigrants were granted the right to vote and to be elected at the 1980 District Council elections in Rotterdam. The results of a research study of urban anthropology clearly show that, contrary to the “universalist” expectations usually found in the Netherlands, Turks and, Moroccans voted more in accordance with the behaviour prevailing in the network of the political leaders (“entrepreneurs”) of local ethnic communities. On the one hand these leaders act as intermediaries between their clients and the Dutch society’s socio-cultural institutions; on the other hand, their personalistic patronage policy brings in oligarchization inside their ethnical community.