Political parties and Muslims in Europe: the regulation of Islam in public education

Abstract

Despite growing anti-immigrant discourse and radical-right party electoral support, most Western European states include Islam in religious education classes in public schools. What are the conditions that explain these policy changes? Who are the main political allies of Muslims’ demands for inclusion in religious education? Based on an original dataset that gathered data on religious education policies in 13 European countries between 1970 and 2010, this article inquires how party ideology and secularisation explain the timing and equal inclusion of Islam. The article shows that, while Left-dominated governments are the main drivers for introducing Islam within curricula, Christian-Democratic parties in power promote equal terms of inclusion, especially in contexts with a secular approach to religious education. These findings enrich our understanding of political parties in secular times by illustrating how the aim of upholding religious influence in education systems motivates Christian Democrats to promote equal rights for Muslims.

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1927546 .

KEYWORDS :

• political partiesPolitical parties
• Christian-Democratic partiesChristian-Democratic parties
• immigrationimmigration
• IslamIslam
• religious educationreligious education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 While there is no shortage of definitions of secularisation, we chose as reference the classical works of Casanova (2011) and Chaves (1994), where secularisation refers to the differentiation of religious institutions from state institutions and the declining scope of religious authority in overseeing political and policy processes.

2 For a detailed explanation of this variable see ‘Methodological Appendix’

3 We performed several other tests including the interaction between party orientation on the one hand and religious legacy (Protestant/Catholic), state involvement in religion (GIR score), and state involvement in religious education policy respectively on the other, but their significance is not preserved across models without a lagged dependent variable.

4 All estimations have a lagged DV. The estimations without a lagged DV do not significantly change the results

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) under Grant 100017L_169273; and German Science Foundation (DFG) under Grant Number 633996.

Notes on contributors

Irina Ciornei

Irina Ciornei is Marie Curie Fellow at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies. Her main lines of work include transnational solidarity and morality policy implementation. Her work has been previously published in the Journal of Common Market Studies, Party Politics, and West European Politics, among others. [[email protected]]

Eva-Maria Euchner

Eva-Maria Euchner is Senior Research Scholar at the Political Science Department of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich and Senior Lecturer at the Fliedner University of Applied Sciences. She is specialises in comparative public policy analysis and legislative behaviour with a specific focus on morality policies. She has published in Regulation and Governance, Journal of European Public Policy, and Parliamentary Affairs. [[email protected]]

Ilay Yesil

Ilay Yesil is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Sociology, University of Bern. Her research interests include social studies of science and technology, secularisation, public policy and moral and ethical dilemmas in contemporary societies. [[email protected]]