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Politics Feeds Back: The Minority/Majority Turnout Gap and Citizenship in Anti-Immigrant Times

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2020

Kristina Bakkær Simonsen Open the ORCID record for Kristina Bakkær Simonsen [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Voting is a democratic virtue and an important mechanism for citizens to let their voices be heard. However, citizens do not participate in politics at equal levels, with consequences for their political power. While turnout gaps between different socioeconomic groups are well researched, the biggest gap in many Western European countries today has been overlooked: that between the children of immigrants (minority youths) and the majority population. I argue that existing theories fall short in addressing this gap because they do not attend to the distinctly political forces that shape citizens’ relationships to politics. Building on the policy-feedback literature, and analyzing seventy-one in-depth interviews with minority and majority youths in Denmark, I show that because these groups are targeted very differently in policy and political discourse, they have substantially different conceptions of politics and their status as citizens. Many minority youths react to anti-immigrant political messages by dissociating from politics, but I warn against interpreting their quiescence as political apathy. Instead, dissociating from politics can be a strategy to reclaim power over their self-understanding and can be experienced as empowering. These findings challenge classic conceptualizations of political engagement and open discussion about how to understand political behavior in increasingly diverse societies.

Type
Special Section: The Politics of Immigration
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 2021 , pp. 406 - 421
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

She would like to thank Rowa Raad Al-Suhaili and Razaleh Zeynalabedin for incredible assistance in recruiting interviewees and conducting interviews with minority youths. She also thanks her crowd of student assistants who transcribed hours and hours of interview recordings. For insightful discussions and feedback early in the project development, she would like to thank Lasse Schmidt Hansen. She has received helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article from participants at the Council for European Studies 2019 conference in Madrid; the Migration and Immigrant Incorporation Workshop, Harvard University; the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Comparative Inequality and Inclusion, Harvard University; and from the QUALIDEM group at UCLouvain. Finally, she thanks four anonymous reviewers and Editor Michael Bernhard for insightful and encouraging feedback. The Aarhus University Research Fund (AUFF) supported this research with a grant.

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