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Political bag carriers in the second chamber: The emergence of a parapolitical pathway to parliament In Western parliamentary democracies, a growing number of MPs have worked as special advisers, political assistants, and parliamentary aides prior to their election as members of parliament. They have professional political expertise without being elected officials themselves. We call them parapoliticians, akin to paramedics or paralegals. This paper researches this emerging pathway to the Dutch Second Chamber. The paper operationalizes the concept, provides theoretical and historical context and offers insights into the prevalence of parapolitical backgrounds among Dutch Second Chamber members, and examines variations across political parties. In the 2021 Second Chamber more than a quarter of MPs had previously worked as a political aid and these MPs have prominent positions in the parliamentary factions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ignoring people: The micro-politics of misrecognition in participatory governance Local governments across the globe increasingly aim to engage citizens in participatory governance, encouraging them to take an active stance in community activities and policy or planning decisions. Despite the inclusive and emancipatory ambitions, these projects often reproduce inequality and exclude citizens leaving them marginalized and misrecognized. In this paper, I argue that inclusion and recognition do not take shape via political ambitions or promising institutional frameworks but via informal face-to-face interactions among citizens and state actors at the street level. By drawing on 3 years of ethnographic fieldwork in The Hague, the Netherlands, I critically unpack how the engagements among state actors and citizens misrecognized the latter as political subjects. Building on critical scholarship on the politics of recognition, I propose an agent-centered and practice-oriented approach that analyzes the micro-politics of misrecognition via (1) narrative analysis, (2) the detailed analysis of speech acts and emotional expressions, and (3) with a specific focus on analyzing the spatial practices that construe the geopolitical realm. As a result, I introduce the tactic of 'ignoring people' as a socio-spatial practice of politics. I found five socio-spatial tactics by which citizens were ignored during the very participatory process in which they were invited: disregarded elements of citizens' stories, omitting their counter-narrative, neglecting citizens' memories, showing disdain for their emotional expressions and being spatially absent from their protest. These insights require scholars interested in understanding the exclusive mechanisms of citizen participation, to turn to the micro-politics of interaction where the political is practiced and experienced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]