31 this dissertation, I empirically examine gender affinity effects within three countries where the phenomenon of gender affinity voting has not previously been studied experimentally: France, Germany and the Netherlands. Case selection A comparative design is indispensable to making generalized statements that are bold yet contain adequate nuance through taking into account the influence of the specific local context in explaining differences in outcomes, especially when it comes to migration studies (Huddleston et al., 2013; Saharso and Scholten, 2013). That is why I gathered data in three countries: France, Germany and the Netherlands. I chose these three countries because they are three large Western European democracies with much in common: similar GDPs per capita2, Gini-indices3, levels of average happiness4 and gender gap index5. With regard to migration history, all three countries have seen new arrivals of immigrants since the Second World War and similar levels of integration of people of different ethnic groups (Alba and Foner, 2015; Foner and Alba, 2008). Moreover, all three countries have a history of elected parliamentarians espousing xenophobic and particularly Islamophobic rhetoric in their national parliaments (Brubaker, 2013), in each country this includes far-right politicians, labor party politicians as well as the national leaders (Abdelkader, 2017; Loukili, 2021a: 25; Vermeulen, 2018). Moreover, the divisive nature of immigration (Dennison and Geddes, 2019), race (Tesler, 2013), Islam (Schmuck and Matthes, 2019) and gender (Anduiza and Rico, 2022) in current political debates in these three countries warrants including the perspective of minority voting citizens. Majority populations of France, Germany and the Netherlands are associated with modernity, rationality, individualism, universality, and these values are used to conceptualize national cultures, as opposed to cultural others, such as Muslims (Vermeulen, 2018). Politicians in Europe believe that these values should be implemented in immigrant communities to change their traditional illiberal value systems (idem). The result is that cultural and religious identities become highly problematized and are presented as security problems, leading to the stigmatization of entire communities. The Netherlands is given as an example of extreme group polarization resulting from years of identity politics, but other European countries, such as France and Germany, are also polarized due to nativist and anti-Islamic discourse propagated by populist politicians (Vermeulen, 2018; van Oosten, 2023b, 2024a). All three countries share groups of ethnic-minority citizens that have entered the national context under two distinctly different circumstances: either through historical 2 Worldbank (2018) GDP ranking. 3 CIA (2018) Distribution of family income - Gini index. 4 UN (2017) World Happiness Report 2017. 5 EIGE (2020) Gender Equality Index 2020.
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