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Institutionalization of Ethnocultural Diversity and the Representation of European Muslims
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 July 2020
Abstract
We seek to explain variation in the descriptive representation of Muslim minorities in national legislatures, relying on an original data set that includes 635 seats filled by Muslim-origin MPs in the lower chambers of national parliaments of twenty-six European polities in three legislative cycles between 2007 and 2018. We argue that the image of a polity as a union of multiple ethnocultural groups, reflected in concrete state policies and institutional arrangements, may be conducive to better descriptive representation of Muslim minorities, who were not originally envisioned as one of the communities constituting the nation. The results of multivariate regression analysis provide support for our hypothesis that the extent to which ethnocultural diversity is recognized and institutionalized helps explain variation in the levels of descriptive representation of European Muslims. We supplement our findings with congruence testing in four brief case studies: Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Bulgaria.
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- Special Section: The Politics of Immigration
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- © American Political Science Association 2020
Footnotes
A list of permanent links to Supplemental Materials provided by the authors precedes the References section.
Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VX6UIH
Previous versions of this manuscript were presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Washington, DC (2010); Board of Trustees Meeting of Koç University (2011); International Workshop on Historical Legacies in Bucharest (2011); and the Council for European Studies Conference in Chicago (2018). We are grateful to Henry Hale, Yoshiko Herrera, Nur Yalman, Belgin San Akça, Leonid Peisakhin, Oxana Shevel, Phillip Roeder, and Selim Erdem Aytaç for their helpful comments and suggestions on previous versions. Kerry Eickholt, Gökçe Silman, Aydın Gündüz, Mert Moral, Beril Duman, Idlir Lika, Zsofia Bocskay, and Endri Ziu provided indispensable research assistance, and Erik Scott, Evangelos Liaras, and Nerina Muzurovic offered their expertise on particular cases. We thank Michael Bernhard and five anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.
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