Mobilising mosques? The role of service attendance for political participation of Turkish and Moroccan minorities in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

Religious service attendance has been identified as an important source of political participation among Christians and Muslims in the USA. In Europe, where religion is seen as a barrier rather than a bridge to Muslims’ integration, the role of mosque attendance for the political participation of Muslims remains understudied. This study asks whether the politically mobilizing role of service attendance extends to Muslim minorities in Europe. We examine direct and indirect effects of the frequency of religious service attendance on organizational participation, political trust and voting intentions among large nationwide samples of Turkish and Moroccan minorities in the Netherlands using multi-group structural equation modelling. Our results show that service attendance relates positively to engagement in both co-ethnic and mainstream organizations. These two forms of civic engagement translate into a greater intention to vote among Turks, but not Moroccans.

KEYWORDS:

• Mosque attendance
• political participation
• civic engagement
• Muslim minorities
• Netherlands

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The seven types are: leisure organization (music, culture or hobby clubs); neighbourhood organization; labour union, professional organization or other interest group; organization for ethnic minorities; political party/organization; religious organization; and organization for the environment or an international cause.

2. Strictly speaking, our measurement captures participation in ethnic minority organizations versus organizations dominated by the Dutch majority. As the NELLS data also provide a measure of contact with co-ethnics in organizations, we confirmed that those who are members of organizations with primarily ethnic minority members report significantly higher contact with co-ethnics in organizations than those who are not members. Moreover, members of ethnic minority organizations have more contact with co-ethnics in organizations than with members of other ethnic groups. Thus, contacts within minority associations are mainly co-ethnic contacts, which justifies our use of the label ‘co-ethnic organization’.

3. We also created dummy variables contrasting any level of involvement in co-ethnic and mainstream organizations with no involvement. The findings remained unchanged.

4. We tested an alternative model reversing the paths from service attendance to organizational participation. This model had a good fit, but slightly worse than the model presented here. Moreover, while participation in co-ethnic organizations was a significant predictor of service attendance in this model, participation in mainstream organizations was not. These alternative results support our reasoning that service attendance positively influences political participation through organizational participation, instead of vice versa.

5. The underlying research materials for this article can be accessed at https://easy.dans.knaw.nl/ui/datasets/id/easy-dataset:34387.