Muslims’ political and civic incorporation in France and Canada: testing models of participation

ABSTRACT

This study examines the impact of national contexts on the political and civic incorporation of Muslim minorities by comparing France and Canada, with their sharply contrasting national integration ‘models’. Using large and comparable national surveys of immigrant minorities (French Trajectories and Origins Survey, 2008; Canadian Ethnic Diversity Survey, 2002), we analyse three interrelated dimensions of political and civic incorporation: acquiring citizenship, voting, and association membership. Our findings suggest a limited effect of national ‘models’ on these outcomes. While citizenship law produces lower naturalisation rates for all non-European-origin immigrants in France compared to Canada – with notably lower rates among French Muslims – Muslims and other non-European minorities are less likely to vote in Canada but not in France. Moreover, association membership positively influences citizenship in France but not in Canada. We conclude that the main effect of national ‘models’ on minorities’ political and civic incorporation occurs through differences in citizenship law itself.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• Muslims
• citizenship
• voting
• civic participation
• and integration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 https://www.france24.com/fr/20170620-legislatives-elus-issus-diversite-plus-presents-jamais-assemblee-nationale.

2 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/record-number-of-visible-minority-mps-elected-to-commons/article26892245/.

3 http://policyoptions.irpp.org/2015/10/17/visible-minority-candidates-in-the-2015-election-making-progress/.

4 https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2018/10/23/torontos-new-council-has-as-many-michaels-as-visible-minorities.html.

5 Given that all our dependent variables are binomial, logistic regression is the most appropriate method of model specification. In order to ensure the robustness of our results – particularly those involving the comparison of coefficients across nested models in different settings – we also replicated the analysis using OLS regression modelling techniques. The results were nearly identical, both in terms of the size and statistical significance of the coefficients. We interpret this replication of results as demonstrating the robustness of the comparative findings.

6 These results are not shown, but are available upon request.

7 https://www.thestar.com/news/immigration/2015/03/24/canada-faces-dramatic-drop-in-citizenship-prompting-concerns-about-disengaged-immigrants.html.