Parties courting Muslim voters in Belgium’s local elections: electoral incentives and ideological tensions

ABSTRACT

This study examines how political parties in urban Europe are responding to the changing demographic landscape, by focusing on a growing population of immigrant origin voters from Muslim majority countries. The 2018 communal elections in Brussels provide an opportunity to examine how party ideology and commune-level demography interact to make Muslim candidate nominations, and ultimately their election, more or less likely. While generally true that parties of the Left nominate and elect more Muslims than do parties of the Right, by far the greatest difference in inclusiveness was identified within the Left, between the Socialists and the Greens. And while the Greens had a good result in these elections, they did so in communes where fewer Muslims concentrate. While this may not be as important at the national level, where voting rights are more restricted, it suggests the need to qualify claims that electoral incentives - and demography – trump ideology in competitive electoral contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Muslims
• local elections
• representation
• political parties
• Belgium
• Brussels Communal Elections in Belgium

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the advice and support of her colleagues at Vesalius College, Brussels (Etterbeek)where she was a scholar in residence in 2018, including Ilke Adam and Giulia Tercovich. She would also like to thank her colleagues at SUNY New Paltz, especially Ilgu Özler, for comments on an earlier draft, and Scott Minkoff for his methodological advice and assistance with Stata.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A second researcher (a Turkish colleague) undertook a reliability check of my coding of a sample of party lists from three different communes, one with a large Muslim population, one medium, and one with a lower share of the population, to assess our agreement. Among the 344 candidate names examined, I identified 40 Muslim names and she identified 32. In each instance of difference, the error was in the same direction, with her underreporting (all Arabic names). In no instance among the sample had I failed to identify a Muslim name that she had identified. In each of the 8 cases she did not identify, I went back to campaign bios and party website and Facebook to confirm the name of likely Muslim origin. By method of agreement, we agreed on 97% of the names, with a correlation (r) of.88. The author consulted party webpages and candidate bios on Facebook when there was doubt about a candidate name, (see, for an example: https://defi.eu/communales-2018-nathalie-erkan-menera-la-liste-defi-saint-josse/; https://www.facebook.com/nathalie.erkandefi). The candidate level dataset posted on author’s website upon publication of the ms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathleen M. Dowley

Kathleen M. Dowley is an associate professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz. Her research focuses on governance in multiethnic European societies, and her work has been published in Europe-Asia Studies, Comparative Political Studies, and the International Journal of Public Opinion Research. She is co-editor, with Susan Ingalls Lewis and Meg Devlin O’Sullivan, of Suffrage and its Limits, SUNY Press, 2020.