What factors explain anti-Muslim prejudice? An assessment of the effects of Muslim population size, institutional characteristics and immigration-related media claims

ABSTRACT

What factors explain majority members’ anti-Muslim prejudice? This is an increasingly important question to ask, but to date only relatively few studies have sought to provide answers from a cross-national comparative perspective. This study aims to help fill this gap. Using data from the seventh round of the European Social Survey (ESS) linked with country-level characteristics, our results indicate that (a) a larger Muslim population size, (b) more liberal immigrant integration policies and (c) greater state support of religion are all associated with lower levels of majority members’ negative attitudes towards Muslim immigration – our indicator of anti-Muslim prejudice. Such attitudes, however, prove to be unrelated to (d) cross-national differences in the frequency of negative immigration-related news reports as measured by the ESS media claims data. Collectively, these findings bring us one important step closer towards a better understanding of interethnic relations between majority members and Muslim immigrants in European host societies.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-Muslim prejudice
• immigrant integration policies (MIPEX)
• state support of religion
• group threat theory
• European Social Survey (ESS)

Acknowledgements

The first two authors contributed equally to the article; order of authorship was decided by the toss of a coin. Anu Masso would like to thank the European Commission (Marie Curie 626601) and the Estonian Research Council (IUT20-38) for financing her research. Eldad Davidov would like to thank the University of Zurich Research Priority Programme ‘Social Networks’ for their support. The authors would like to thank Lisa Trierweiler for the English proof of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Elmar Schlueter http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3880-4111

Anu Masso http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3134-950X

Eldad Davidov http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3396-969X

Notes

1 Some comments on terminology are in order before we outline our theoretical expectations. In this paper, we adapt Crandall and Eshleman’s (2003, 414) general definition of prejudice as ‘a negative evaluation of a social group or a negative evaluation of an individual that is significantly based on the individual’s group membership’ to designate majority members’ negative attitudes towards Muslim immigrants. The empirical and theoretical focus of anti-Muslim prejudice certainly encompasses multiple dimensions. However, it is the immigration of people of Muslim faith that figures particularly high on the public agenda of European host societies, and it is thus this facet of anti-Muslim prejudice that is focused on in the present study.

2 All data and replication materials are available from the first author upon request.

3 The countries (with sample size in parentheses, including cases with missing values) in the analysis were: Austria (1555), Belgium (1488), the Czech Republic (2092), Germany (2712), Denmark (1370), Spain (1751), Estonia (1486), Finland (1984), France (1645), United Kingdom (1930), Hungary (1670), Ireland (2069), Lithuania (2173), Netherlands (1705), Norway (1259), Poland (1598), Portugal (1167), Slovenia (1115), Sweden (1541) and Switzerland (1091). Data were retrieved from http://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/ where more detailed information about data collection procedures and methodological documentation is provided.

4 A recent study (Davidov, Cieciuch and Schmidt 2018) has shown that the measurement parameters of this item are rather similar across European countries when included in a latent variable that measures attitudes to various specific immigrant groups such as Muslims, Sinti and Roma or Jews. The average number of missing values in this variable was rather moderate (3.6%). We therefore opted for listwise deletion instead of more sophisticated procedures for dealing with missing data in the analysis. However, supplemental analyses using robust full information maximum likelihood estimations yielded highly similar results to those reported here and are available in tabulated form upon request.

5 More detailed information on different variants of Islamic faith, for example Sunni, Shi’s or Alawites, was unfortunately not available, but such a differentiation is beyond the scope of this study.

6 Preliminary analyses have shown that the effect of ‘TV news’ is considerably lower. Therefore we did not include this variable as a control variable in the analysis.

7 No scatter plot is presented for the fourth independent country-level variable, News reports related to immigration and Muslims, because it was a dummy variable. Instead, we report its association with country variations in anti-Muslim prejudice below.

8 For the dummy variables in our models, we divided the unstandardised regression coefficient b by the standard deviation of anti-Muslim prejudice. Thus, b expresses the change for anti-Muslim prejudice in standard deviation units when the independent variable changes from the reference category to one (Muthén and Muthén 1998–2017, 800).

9 As suggested by a reviewer, we furthermore examined whether accounting for country-level economic conditions alters the association between immigrant integration policies and respondents’ negative attitudes towards Muslims. However, it turned out that an additional model including country-level GDP left the previously observed parameter estimate of immigrant integration policies intact (β = −0.385; b = −0.010, p < .05).