29 attitudes towards immigrants are far more critical towards Muslims, pointing towards the importance in how voting citizens reject religious fundamentalism in the name of political liberalism (Helbling and Traunmüller, 2018). With these trends towards politicization, collective identity and identity-threat become quantifiably stronger, as decades of evidence suggests (Frey, 2022; Lajevardi and Oskooii, 2018; Oskooii, 2016; Simon and Klandermans, 2001: 327; Voas and Fleischmann, 2012). In turn, religion is an important aspect of a Muslim’s identity, with Muslims scoring extremely high on numerous religiosity indicators (Fleischmann and Phalet, 2012: 329). However, if I only include politician ethnicity/race, one does not know whether people are reading their preferred religion into ethnicity/race or whether they prefer shared-ethnicity as it is (Di Stasio et al., 2019). That is why I disentangle ethnicity/race and religion in order to understand exactly which one is the driver of results. The only European experiment measuring co-religion between politician and citizen finds clear co-religiosity effects (Arnesen et al., 2019: 54). However, the experiment does not make a distinction between Christian and Muslim respondents. Given the underrepresentation of Muslim respondents in most surveys I expect that this co-religiosity effect is actually either a co-Christianity effect or an anti-Muslim effect, or both. Furthermore, Muslim citizens of Antwerp, Belgium show a strong preference for Muslim candidates (Azabar et al., 2020) and researchers find a co-Muslim effect in India as well (Heath et al., 2015). What explains Muslim affinity voting? Many seemingly logical reasons have been discredited in the literature. First, it is unlikely to be caused by religious practice, because Muslims who practice their faith more actively do not necessarily vote for Muslim candidates more often (Azabar et al., 2020: 8). Second, I expect the use of heuristics by Muslim citizens to be limited. Whereas majorities might use heuristics to assess politicians, Muslim minorities are more likely to resist stereotypes (van Es, 2019), be aware of the diversity within the group of Muslims (Baysu and Phalet, 2017; Baysu and Swyngedouw, 2020; Ellethy, 2016; Fleischmann and Phalet, 2012; Phalet et al., 2010; Verkuyten and Yildiz, 2009) and, therefore, be less inclined to resort to heuristics compared to out-groups who might be more likely to see Muslims as a monolithic bloc. Third, experiences of descriptive representation that did not lead to substantive representation, might lead to feelings of betrayal (Akachar, 2018; Anderson, 1997), weakening the likelihood of heuristic use. Indeed, Muslims might experience descriptive representation as being suppressive as they see politicians with a Muslim background explicitly speak out against Muslims (Aydemir and Vliegenthart, 2016). Given that so many explanations of Muslim affinity voting have been debunked, there is still a need to understand why Muslims do prefer voting for their in-group. One explanation for Muslim affinity voting that still stands lies in feelings op exclusion amongst Muslim voters, leading to voting for fellow Muslim politicians (Azabar et al., 2020: 8). My dissertation therefore focusses on the relationship between voting for
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjY0ODMw