Minding the political engagement gap: how discrimination and religion impact Dutch voters with an immigrant background

Abstract

This article examines the gap between the political engagement of Dutch citizens with an racialized immigrant background and those without one. Analyzing the effect of perceived cultural and religious inclusion and exclusion, we look into what citizens with an immigrant background make of politics—measured in what we call the evaluation gap—and their actual electoral behavior—measured in what we call the participation gap. Drawing from the 2021 Dutch Parliamentary Election Study and the 2021 Dutch Ethnic Minority Election Study, we include a uniquely broad range of immigrant backgrounds in our analysis. This combination of studies lets us transcend typical migrant/non-migrant dichotomies and include smaller, often understudied immigrant groups. Our analyses reveal that the evaluation gap is most pronounced for the largest, most-frequently studied immigrant groups, while the participation gap is most pronounced among commonly overlooked groups. Embeddedness in religious communities does not correlate with the evaluation gap though it does seem to suppress a deeper participation gap. Perceived discrimination, including in the form of underrepresentation, mobilizes citizens with an immigrant background, which obscures an underlying participation gap while also partly explaining the evaluation gap.

Religiosity and electoral turnout among Muslims in Western Europe

“…Unexpectedly and notably, we found basically no effects of mosque attendance amongst European Muslims, which is not in line with classic mobilization and resource models and claims in the migrant voter literature (Fennema and Tillie, 1999;Franklin, 2004;Schlozman et al, 2018;Spierings and Vermeulen, 2023). Here, the specificity of Muslims in Europe may offer an explanation as most previous research related to attendance and voting has been conducted with majority Christian voters or with voters who are ethnic, but not religious minorities (e.g., African American Christians; Calhoun-Brown, 1996) or a specific groups of Muslims in Europe (mostly Turkish, the largest, most organized Muslim population).…”

“…Of the sample, 64% received a positive vote score (Table 1). While turnout is often over-reported in surveys, our percentage is lower than the average turnout in most recent elections in Western Europe of 74% (IDEA, 2022), which is in line with existing knowledge on migrant population turnout (e.g., Spierings and Vermeulen, 2023).…”