Contentious politics and congruence across policy and public spheres: the case of Muslims in France

ABSTRACT

The politics around Muslims is particularly contentious in France, where Republicanism and secularism dominate the debate. In this study, we examine how the politics of Muslims finds its way across policy and public spheres. First, we discuss the societal dynamics that contributed to the presence of Muslims. Second, we provide a first estimate of how French citizens as a whole respond to the contentious politics of Muslims and what their aggregate opinions are vis-à-vis Muslims. Third, we discuss how parties and policies reflect the growing Muslim migration. In this regard, we design a unique measure of the policy space related to the contentious politics of Muslims. We find initial indications of democratic congruence between what citizens want and what governments give them. Altogether, we present vital insights related to the contentious politics of Muslims, and more generally the relationship between policy and public spheres in this domain.

KEYWORDS:

• Public domain
• policy domain
• contentious politics
• Muslims
• Islam
• France

Notes

1 The selected items concern all questions with reference to positions towards Muslim migration and integration, positions towards government policy regarding Muslims, positions towards Muslims, economic or cultural implications of Muslim migrants or Muslim migration, Islamophobia and Muslim-specific prejudice. The selection excludes all items that inquire about migration more generally, as well as racism, refugees, asylum seekers and illegals specifically. We refer to the supplementary materials for more details regarding the individual items, the original surveys, the question wording, the years of measurement and the degree of repetition.

2 To maintain maximal temporal variation, we do not smooth the estimated measure.

3 Observations from the early- and mid-1990s should be taken with a grain of salt because of limited data availability. We, therefore, refrain from interpreting their precise values, or exact distances. Despite the salient nature of Muslim migration and integration since the early 1990s, it took some time for survey companies to properly reflect this in their survey traditions. Additionally, the polarizing nature of this issue often provides challenges in terms of data frequency.

4 Both measures only modestly relate to each other (pairwise correlation = 0.21).

5 The corresponding question is, “Can you tell me for each of these words whether it brings to mind something very positive, fairly positive, fairly negative or very negative? – Islam”. The original question, in French, is “Pouvez-vous me dire pour chacun de ces mots il évoque pour vous quelque chose de très positif, d'assez positif, d'assez négatif ou de très négatif? – Islam”.

6 They simultaneously find that biological racism and anti-Semitism systematically decrease, which further highlights that French Republicanism draws from cultural oppositions between “us” and “them”. It delegitimises the salience of ascribed characteristics in public life, hence facilitating the integration of racial minorities.

7 Politicization is a multi-faceted process that includes both the public visibility of conflict (i.e. its salience) and the polarization of actors on a contentious issue.

8 These claims were coded by random sampling articles selected from Libération, Le Figaro, Le Monde, La Croix, and Le Point from 1999 to 2008. The choice of newspapers has followed from the need to insure as much as possible a representative and unbiased sample, including both quality newspapers and more tabloid-oriented newspapers (cf. Cinalli and Giugni 2013b for further methodological remarks).

9 Our collection of data built upon previous work by the EURISLAM project, which was delivered under the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Union (Grant Agreement number: 215863). See also Cinalli and Giugni (2013a, 2016) and Koopmans et al. (2005) for similar applications of average indexes between most restrictive and most permissive policies.

10 It is worth mentioning that complementary research using such a measure highlights the particularly restrictive status of some of the individual indicators that comprise the aggregate measure – most notably those related to the core of French Republicanism, such as laicité and schooling.