Amanda Garrett
DRAFT 2: Research Proposal (December 3, 2010)
Muslims and their Localities: Explaining Variation in Policy Response
I. Introduction: The Puzzle
Today across Europe, which has experienced large-scale migration from the Muslim
world over the last half-century, the debate about the integration and accommodation of
Muslim minorities is becoming an increasingly salient political issue. For example, the
past electoral success of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 2002 French presidential elections, the
late Pim Fortuyn’s party in the 2002 Dutch parliamentary elections, recent 2010
Parliamentary success of the Dutch far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) making it the third
largest party in the Netherlands, and similar successes in Denmark, Belgium and Austria
have signaled the rise of the xenophobic right and the increasing politicization of the
Muslim issue. The already tense relationship of these Muslim communities to the larger
society has been further exacerbated by heated debates surrounding the affaire du foulard
and the Burqa in France, Holland and Germany, Mosques and Minarets in Switzerland,
Germany and France, and 2005 riots in France and the assassinations of Pim Fortuyn and
filmmaker Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands. These events, which seem to be indicative
of an increasingly hostile and sometimes violent interaction between Muslims and
national groups, also suggest that the presence and integration of these minority groups
continues to be viewed with skepticism from both sides.
This is largely the assumption present in the literature, that the integration of Muslim
minorities has not been a stellar success anywhere in Europe, which is not an unrealistic
conclusion given the scope and abstractness of most studies on minority incorporation
that rely on “national model” and minority characteristics to explain outcomes. However,
only a more nuanced and systematic study of how policy gets made at all levels of
government – not just the national level – will indicate that the relationship between the
state and its minorities is not so monolithically negative. So there are two important
points to take away from this observation. First, it is crucial that we understand the
mechanisms behind success and failure because they are empirical realities, the causes of
which are still not well known. Second, we need to study this success and failure at the
local level, where minorities and policy-making bodies are more likely to interact in ways
that are most salient to their daily lives and ultimate integration. There is a great deal of
variation in the accommodation and treatment of Muslim demands and needs across
Europe’s cities that can never be captured by restricting analysis to national-level or
minority-specific variables. So while extant research understands the general trend in
policy responses to minorities to be predominantly the result of these two factors, this
dissertation will demonstrate that a closer look at what happens at the local level may
force us to alter our understanding of both how these national models work and how
“successful” and “unsuccessful” policies are made, where success is defined as a fair,
representative and well-intentioned process.
Amanda Garrett
More specifically, it is clear that the literature on national models of minority integration
is by far the most prevalent means for explaining policy responses – at some level, most
outcomes are being traced back to these historically embedded ideological and
institutional mechanisms for dealing with minority groups. And while there is no doubt
that these national approaches are an integral part of minority policy, they are too often
treated as inflexible paradigms or abstract concepts of policy-making and therefore, fail
to provide an adequately nuanced picture of the possible range of policy responses that
will give justice to the diversity of minority treatment in these countries. For example,
much of the research on integration constructs either real or metaphorical integration
index scores and rankings of host societies based on their “success” in one or more policy
sector (Cinar, Davy and Waldrauch 1999) where any deviance risks being construed as a
negative result. Similarly, inherent in these studies is a problem with the level of analysis,
where a bulk of these studies have looked at the nation-state, leaving only a paucity of
work on the urban or city-level context of minority policy responses. In short, this project
is motivated by two primary observations stemming from this national model literature.
First is the problem of intellectual approach, where relying on theoretically driven
notions of fixed national responses to minorities often misses important nuances in the
policy-making reality in these countries. Secondly, beginning at the national level can
present an empirical problem when understanding integration or policy success as there is
reason to believe that success along these measures is more likely to begin at the local,
not national, level.
This is an important oversight because in some cases it is clear that the local level is more
important than the national level, where the city or municipality is the main location for
all citizens, including Muslim minorities, to make demands on and claims to a range of
municipal services from housing, to schools, to labour markets and politics. It is these
factors that ultimately affect the daily lives of Muslims in Europe; it will help determine
educational and linguistic attainment, socio-economic status, spatial segregation and
contact with non-Muslims, and their interest and engagement in civic and political
activities. In response to these demands, cities have formulated a variety of pro-active
and reactive minority policies using their own instruments and resources (Ireland 2008).
In short, municipalities have enacted policies to make minorities feel at home or to
encourage them to leave - ranging from antagonistic to supportive. None of this variation
can be captured, much less explained, if the focus is on national-level variables, which is
what this dissertation seeks to remedy.
The impetus for this project therefore arises from the desire to create a more intellectually
nuanced and empirically representative picture of what determines an instance of positive
policy response to Muslim minorities, which is something that is high on the agenda of
policy-makers and academics alike. The literature has often taken for granted the
usefulness of local variation in learning how minorities are treated in a given country,
preferring to focus on the better understood and more systematically accessible national
level factors. Yet, the vast diversity of institutional, structural and ideological approaches
used to deal with Muslim minorities that we see across European countries has
categorically failed to reproduce itself in subsequent differences in outcomes of policy or
integration. So we need a more nuanced way to understand certain policy outcomes,
Amanda Garrett
where national model effects actually manifest themselves in the policy process, and
what other processes are involved in the process, all of which can be done by changing
the unit of analysis to the city.
The research design is case-oriented and methodology is qualitative and based on
interviews collected in the field as well as access to secondary and primary sources. The
burden of causal inference will rest on a systematic process analysis of policy responses
to Muslim minorities in Paris, Marseille, Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Cross-case
comparison reveals two cases of positive policy response (Marseille and Amsterdam) and
two relatively less positive cases (Paris and Rotterdam), and I have selected these cities
for two methodological reasons. First, it allows me to hold national policy and structure
(i.e. national models) constant while varying local instances of success and failure, and
second, I will be able to hold local success constant and look at variation in national
policy and structure.
The insights from this dissertation should illuminate they ways in which successful and
less successful policy responses towards Muslim minorities are formed. By looking at
city variation, I go beyond “national model” descriptions of minority policy-making and
attempt to explain not how national approaches to integration policy differ across
countries, but rather how they differentially affect local policy resources and instruments
to produce outcomes that are immediately relevant to the daily lives of Muslims in
Europe. The rest of the prospectus will follow in four parts: the literature review, theory
and hypotheses, research design and cases, and feasibility.
III. Theory and Hypothesis
It is not a surprise that the experience of Muslim minorities differs greatly across country
and even between cities, which makes comparative analysis across cases of prime
importance for understanding how institutions should be molded to make them more
responsive, and how cities stimulate minorities to find a suitable place in society for
political, social, and economic participation and integration. There have, of course, been
many studies that seek to answer these questions, but they tend to be too abstract,
theoretical, normative, or national-level specific to inform us about the local and
contextualized forms of inclusion that shape Muslims’ daily lives. In this respect, cities
have quite a unique responsibility towards minorities, one that is distinct from the
national level (Penninx et al. 2004).
If we want to understand how local governments respond to Muslim minorities’ presence,
how minorities place themselves in the political arena and how this affects policy
outcomes, there are two possible routes - top-down and bottom-up - and all of the
proposed hypotheses will help distinguish the importance between these two lines of
argument. The first top-down approach refers to the dimensions of policy-making that
emanate from the power of the state, both national and local. This includes the
institutional, structural and ideological framework within which national and city
administrations enact and implement minority policies, as well as the state actors
Amanda Garrett
involved in the process. All of these variables help highlight how open or closed a given
society will be to the minority needs and demands presented to them. Alternatively, the
bottom-up approach will allow a closer look at the actions of minorities themselves,
including the degree of their mobilization, their political and organizational resources,
their requests and claims on the local and national administrations, and ultimately their
impact on policy outcomes. When it comes to determining the relative importance of
these two arguments, is impossible at this point to say which is more important (or which
variables are more important) because none are truly independent from one another. The
policy-making process necessarily includes a combination of top-down and bottom-up
factors and operates in terms of a complex feedback process, so the goal should be to try
and untangle these potential explanations.
I would like use both approaches to explore the conditions under which localities respond
to the needs and demands of their Muslim minorities and the reasons for variation in
response across locality as well as policy domain. By focusing on an array of local
government responses to Muslim minorities – symbolic politics, government rhetoric,
policy making and outcomes – it is possible to capture the relationship of the locality to
its minority as a multidimensional process.
I intend to argue that nature of local authority response and interaction with Muslim
minorities depends largely on their perception of the potential costs and benefits of
different kinds of responses, namely positive, negative, or avoidance. The localities’
evaluation of the potential costs and benefits of different policy responses may be
influenced by a variety of factors, including surrounding institutional arrangements and
structural factors, such as national models of immigrant incorporation, electoral systems
and political parties, or government structure and its impact on policy jurisdiction and
implementation (i.e. centralized vs. decentralized state). However, it should be noted that
while these institutional factors cannot be ignored, the case selection of this study helps
us control for the impact of these variables by themselves, so while they are no doubt
important, they are not singularly responsible for the outcomes we see. Instead we must
consider additional factors such as the character of the local Muslim population, which
may also affect the cost-benefit calculation if they are particularly active in politics
(Garbaye 2002) or have strong and vocal social networks (Pfaff 2006), the city’s
historical relationship with immigration, and local policy-makers’ personal ideologies.
Overall, the more confident local policy-makers can be that responding favorably to its
Muslim population will strengthen its political, economic or ideological position, the
more likely they will be to seek the potential benefit of such a response, which might
include policy measures, symbolic action or rhetoric. Conversely, if local authorities fear
that positive engagement will undermine their political, economic or ideological position,
they will opt for more negative policy, or avoidance. Policy-makers, however, do not
operate in a vacuum and their decisions will be colored by some combination of the
aforementioned factors. It is the goal of this study to seek to identify conditions and
combinations of factors - both from the state and the minorities themselves - under
which pragmatic considerations favor positive, negative or evasive responses.
Amanda Garrett
First, I will mention a few alternative explanations that are prevalent in the literature, not
because they are untrue or irrelevant, but because they are not sufficient to explain the
variation in local success and failure in which we are interested.
Alternative Hypotheses:
The predominant overture in the literature on Muslim integration is to focus on the
importance of varying national models of state-minority relations. Differences in policy
outcomes and official rhetoric towards minorities across countries have largely been
attributed to the historically determined and path dependent set of ideological,
institutional and structural responses to diversity unique to each state, called the national
model (Fetzer and Soper; Soysal; Brubaker; Koopmans and Statham). This literature has
been used to understand the governance of Islam in Europe, namely the way in which
society creates or stifles opportunity for the development of Islam. There is no doubt that
these national approaches to minority integration help us understand the process of
policy-making, but they do not tell the whole story. First, the national institutional and
ideological framework for dealing with minorities is not all-powerful and it likely has
unintended, counterproductive and residual effects across levels of government and
policy domains that cannot be captured by looking at national models alone. For this
reason, the case selection of this study, which looks at one set of successful and less
successful instances of local policy outcomes across two distinct national contexts allows
us to look beyond the solitary impact of national models.
Another set of explanations used to illuminate the relationship between state and minority
focuses on the characteristics of the minority group themselves, where the religion,
culture and class of the minority matter. According to these theories, a minority’s
common class identity (Castles et al 1990) or ethnic or racial identity (Miller 1990) is of
fundamental importance in determining their participation in and interaction with the
system. A subset of this literature looks specifically at Muslim minorities – their internal
structure and culture, the formation of associations and the development of identities –
and how this affects their position vis-à-vis the state. Again, one cannot discount the
relevance of minority-specific characteristics, yet they can tell us nothing unless we
understand how they are restrained or encouraged by societal factors. To help us separate
the impact of group-specific variables, this study will look at city couples with the same
minority compositions – Turks and Moroccans in the Netherlands and Moroccans and
Algerians in France.
Hypotheses:
Amanda Garrett
Based on the idea that local responses to Muslim minorities are the product of costbenefit analysis on the part of local leaders who are forced to act amidst a variety of topdown and bottom-up forces, I would like to test the following hypotheses:
1) Ethnic minority policy is a distinct sector of policy-making with its own local
dynamics, which cant be explained using national-level factors alone. It is the
result of social forces and institutional design within that sector, which may be
different from urban or national factors.
2) When the Left is in the opposition, instances of positive symbolic politics and
rhetoric will likely increase. When the Right is in the opposition, instances of
negative symbolic politics and rhetoric will likely increase.
Borrowing from the literature on social movements, we see that the party system and
distribution of power can affect the treatment of the movement, and it is possible that the
same factors at play here can influence a state’s treatment of minorities. For example, like
social movements, it is theorized that minority constituencies belong to the electoral
potential of the Left, in which case the position of the left in politics may impact local
governmental responses to Muslim minorities. If the left is in the opposition, we will
likely see more instances of symbolic politics or positive rhetoric towards Muslim
minorities as they seek the support of this demographic and conversely if the right is in
the opposition, there will likely be more instances of negative rhetoric in an attempt to
target their constituency. In short, when in a position of opposition the parties will tend
to address Muslim minorities primarily in terms of symbolic politics and political rhetoric
– the political tools available to them – rather than policy outcomes, and these actions
will reflect their need to target certain constituencies, where the Left will lean towards
positive responses and the Right towards less positive responses.
3) When the Left is in power, instances of positive policy should increase and when
the Right is in power, instances of negative policy, or avoidance should increase.
When the Left is in power and in a better position to propose and implement policy, there
should be an increase in the likelihood of proposed and successful policies benefiting
Muslim minorities, which are an important fraction of the Left’s constituency. Instances
of symbolic politics and positive rhetoric should continue as they are a useful component
of the party’s political toolbox and the Left cannot afford to lose the support of its
constituency between elections. Additionally, from the literature on redistribution and
political parties, we know that the Left is more prone to engage in redistribution, a policy
which may be more favorable to minorities in the community, and the Right less prone to
such policies; therefore, this is an additional indication of the potentially beneficial
outcomes for minorities when the Left is in power as opposed to the Right (Iversen and
Soskice 2006). Similarly, for the Right, with policy-making now one of their political
Amanda Garrett
resources, while in power instances of policy that negatively affects Muslim minorities,
or avoids them altogether should increase.
4) When in power, the ability of a party to negotiate for policy towards minorities
will be affected by their position (i.e. whether they are governing alone, or part of
a coalition).
Building from the previous hypothesis, one would expect that the nature of the policy or
the amenability of the Left to making concessions to this group should also be affected by
its position in government – i.e. whether it is part of a governing coalition or not – as this
will impact its ability to negotiate policy. If the Left is governing alone, there will likely
be a better chance they can initiate positive policy responses unhindered by a minority
coalition partner, but if the Left is that minority coalition partner, they may be limited in
their ability to make policy concessions to this constituency. The same will be true for the
Right, except with respect to less favorable policy for minorities. Again, borrowing from
the literature on electoral systems and political parties, it is clear that the type of electoral
institution present in a given polity can affect which parties get into power. For example,
in polities with systems of proportional representation Left parties tend to dominate, and
the likelihood of a governing coalition is much higher, whereas in majoritarian systems,
Right parties tend to dominate, which in turn could be linked to expected policy
responsiveness to minorities (Iversen and Soskice 2006).
5) How and to what extent Muslim minorities participate in the political process
impacts policy outcomes. The higher the rate of enfranchisement, the proportion
of minority representation in local councils, position as mayor, and the support
local Muslim organizations receive from established political pressure groups
should all (independently and in tandem) increase the instances of positive policy
responses from the local administration.
As we have seen, the majority of literature on immigrant incorporation has been devoted
to describing policy instruments (Hammar 1985), assessing outcomes (Doomernik 1998),
making cross-country comparisons to explain national models of integration (Castles
1995; Favell 1998; Schnapper 1992), explaining the content and development of national
integration policy and those involved (Guiraudon 1998). And similarly, a majority of
these works take a top-down approach, like examining the role of elites (Katznelson
1976; Messina 1987) because they rest on the assumption that minorities are usually too
weak to make significant claims on the political agenda (Martiniello 1994). This
hypothesis stems from the idea that bottom-up activities may matter in the policy-making
process.
Specifically, from the literature on minorities and politics in Europe we know how the
institutional structure of a given society can encourage or hinder minority participation in
Amanda Garrett
the political process, but there is much less known about how minority participation
impacts policy. However, from scholarly work on minorities in American politics there
are instances of black Americans pushing important policies for their own communities
once elected to local office (Browning et al., 1997) and of the importance of descriptive
representation in Congress as a more symbolic measure to ensure a continued presence of
that minority in the legislative process (Swain 1995). When it comes to Muslim
minorities in European cities, there is a range of possible participatory forms to study,
including office holding, voting or membership in an ethnic organization with lobbying
power. Because minority participation at the elected level is likely to be minimal in
relation to non-minority participation and their influence tempered by other members of
government or by the electoral process itself, it is possible that we see little impact from
elected minorities on policy outcomes, where their presence is limited to descriptive
representation only. Their substantive representation is more likely to come from the
influence of ethnic organizations and the political resources of those groups vis-à-vis the
system.
Within the literature in American and European politics, there is a substantive body of
work that links minority participation in the political process to positive outcomes and
this hypothesis will consider these variables. For example, it has been shown that the
presence of a minority mayor (Stein 1986; Browning, Marshall and Tabb 1984), local
council representation (Haider-Markel et al. 2000; Mladenka 1989), ability and
willingness to vote (Garbaye 2002), and the capacity of minority organizations to gain
formal support of political pressure groups (McClain 1993) all increase the chances that
policy response towards minorities will be positive.
6) The structure and “culture” of government, and the subsequent division of policy
jurisdictions will affect a city’s policy response to minorities, where minorities
will fare better under unreformed structures than under reformed ones.
The structure of government – centralized vs. decentralized, reformed vs. unreformed –
impacts how policy is made and who makes it. Already in the European cases we see a
distinction between types of government patterns of policy making through the literature
on national models, where the French assimilationst regime is highly centralized when it
comes to immigration policy and the Dutch multicultural regime is centralized, but allots
a significantly higher degree of power to local governments. Similarly, policy reports on
these two countries highlight the central role of the national government in France, which
permeates almost every level and arena of policy-making, leaving local authorities rarely
completely autonomous in their actions, whereas the Dutch localities are largely
independent to produce and implement policy towards minority free from the
intervention of the national regime (OSI 2007). And while there is not much systematic
work in the European cases about the consequences of regime type on minority policy,
the American literature provides some useful analogies.
Amanda Garrett
From this literature we know that the U.S. government reserves most of the power in the
arena of immigration policy (status setting, entry policy etc.), but still city governments
are allowed to handle policy in the social domain and deal with minorities in ways that
are distinct from the national government according to their jurisdiction - like
distributing services (Hero 1986), dispersing federal monies to organizations and
projects (Hero 1990), and employing minorities in civic service (Hero, 1990; Eisinger
1982; Karnig and Welch 1980). There is still a debate in this literature about the
implications of this division of jurisdictions and whether the national or state government
is “nicer” to minorities. Some scholars find that the federal government and Congress
tend to me much more amicable when it comes to minority policy than the state
governments, which largely enact “symbolic policies” to curb minority rights (i.e.
bilingual education) (Sartoro 1999) or simply shy away for moral or racial policies in
favor of fiscal management (Eisinger 1998). Others, however see the opposite, where
U.S. states have often bestowed additional rights (driver’s licenses) or simply not
cooperated with federal sanction policy (Schuck 2007). Either way, it is clear that the
structure of government prompts variation in policy response at different levels, and it is
the hope of this hypothesis to analyze this distinction in the European case.
One place to start is with the distinction between reformed and unreformed systems made
by Eisinger (1982), which helps explain variation in city institutional configurations and
cultures. In reformed cities where the goal is to keep “politics” out of the administration,
political competition and pluralism are minimal and there is much tighter central control
over policy, which is quite closely linked to the idea of a traditionalistic culture (Elazar
1984). Conversely, unreformed cities are more politically competitive and the system is
more open to minority participation and voice, which is more reminiscent of an
individualistic political culture where politics is a marketplace for ideas. These authors
find that minorities tend to fare much better in unreformed and individualistic cities and
much worse in reformed and traditionalistic ones, and examples of this can be seen in the
case of Europe. For example, in Paris – reformed and traditionalistic - until the late 70s
the city was ruled by a prefect where the national government reigned stronger than
municipal efforts, particularly in immigration policy, where local outcomes reflected
national decisions.
Presentation of Preliminary data