Perceived religious discrimination and confidence in Canadian institutions

ABSTRACT

Using a recent cycle of the Canadian General Social Survey (N = 27,534), this paper first examines the extent of perceived religious discrimination among religious minorities of Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist. The results show that Muslims and Jews are statistically significantly and largely more likely to report that they have experienced religious discrimination than other religious minorities. Subsequently, the impact of religious discrimination on the self-reported confidence in a number of Canadian institutions is assessed. Religious discrimination is found to negatively influence the confidence of discriminated Muslims in the institutions, but it appears without such impact for discriminated Jews. Various implications are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• Islam
• Judaism
• discrimination
• confidence in institutions
• Canada

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.