32 ties between sending and receiving country (colonial ties in the cases of the Netherlands and France and the former Soviet connection in the case of Germany), or through a relationship between sending and receiving country with regard to labor migration (from Turkey in Germany and small parts of France and from Turkey and Morocco in the Netherlands) (Alba, 2005; Yurdakul, 2009). The three countries have, historically, approached immigration to their countries with quite different integration regimes. France was originally typified as “assimilationist” strengthened by its strong tradition of laïcité, Germany “segregationist” and the Netherlands “multicultural”, although all three are now converging (Joppke, 2007). Nowadays, they score similarly on the MIPEX-score, a score summarizing all integration-related policies and the extent to which they lead to equal treatment. Compared to the rest of Europe, all three take on an intermediate position (Green et al., 2020: 636). Despite increasingly similar integration regimes, France, Germany, and the Netherlands have completely different stances towards the division of church and state. France proposes the strictest division and laïcité as a core tenet of French culture (Brubaker, 2017; Simon and Tiberj, 2018), while Germany and to a greater extent, the Netherlands proclaim more leniency towards the visibility of religion in public life (Kinnvall and Nesbitt-Larking, 2009, 2011; Mepschen et al., 2010; Zimmerman, 2015). For instance, following the notion of laïcité, religious instruction in schools is non-existent in France, whereas it is “optional” in the Netherlands and “obligatory” in Germany (Kuru, 2008: 2). The Netherlands recognizes Islam as an official state religion, while France defines its state relation with the Muslim community within a secular context and Germany within a confessional or religious neutrality context (Saral, 2020: 5). These views are reflected in the stances towards background characteristics in French politics: personal background characteristics are deemed irrelevant to politics, and ethnic interests are considered class interests in disguise (Bloemraad and Schönwälder, 2013: 573). There are also many differences in the electoral systems of France, Germany, and the Netherlands. France belongs to a completely different “family” of voting systems with single-member districts and a two-round runoff for national elections (Hague et al., 2016). Germany uses mixed member proportional representation, with a first vote for a direct candidate of their constituency and a second vote for a party list, and a threshold of five percent for a political party to enter the Bundestag, and elements of a single-member district system (idem). The Netherlands uses party list proportional representation with preference votes and a threshold of one seat in parliament, one of the most proportional voting systems in the world. More proportional systems are known to lead to more ethnic/racial and religious minority representation in parliament (Barker and Coffé, 2018; Hughes, 2016). Consistent with this, the Netherlands leads in the descriptive representation of immigrant origin politicians in national parliaments (Bloemraad, 2013; Fernandes et al., 2016; Vermeulen, 2018). However, France takes an
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