Erik Bleich

What Is Islamophobia and How Much Is There? Theorizing and Measuring an Emerging Comparative Concept

Islamophobia is an emerging comparative concept in the social sciences. Yet there is no widely accepted definition of Islamophobia that permits systematic comparative and causal analysis. This article explores how the term Islamophobia has been deployed in public and scholarly debates, emphasizing that these discussions have taken place on multiple registers. It then draws on research on concept formation, prejudice, and analogous forms of status hierarchies to offer a usable social scientific definition of Islamophobia as indiscriminate negative attitudes or emotions directed at Islam or Muslims. The article discusses the types of indicators that are most appropriate for measuring Islamophobia as well as the benefits of concept development for enabling comparative and causal analysis.

Integrating Ideas into Policy-Making Analysis Frames and Race Policies in Britain and France

This article argues that systematically integrating ideas into policy-making analysis greatly enhances our understanding of policy outcomes. Variables emphasized by other schools of thought—such as power, interests, institutions, and problems—often provide an inadequate explanation of policy choices. To demonstrate the contribution of ideas to policy-making analysis, this article examines the impact of policy frames, showing how they help actors define their interests, generate interpretations of pressing problems, and constrain actions. Retracing the history of race policy development in Britain and France reveals that each countrys frames influenced domestic policy outcomes and thus played a vital role in explaining cross-national race policy differences.

Where do Muslims stand on ethno-racial hierarchies in Britain and France? Evidence from public opinion surveys, 1988–2008

ABSTRACT Bleich assesses levels of anti-Muslim prejudice in two important European countries—Britain and France—to begin a process of systematically evaluating the status of Muslims on national ethno-racial hierarchies. He reviews major scholarly and institutional public opinion polls from 1988 through 2008 to discern attitudes towards Muslims over time and in comparison to other religious and ethnic groups. The findings support the following conclusions: negative attitudes towards Muslims have risen over the past twenty years in Britain and France; when compared to other religious groups, Muslims are viewed with tremendous suspicion by British and French respondents; and, in spite of the events of recent years, Muslims have not sunk to the bottom of the ethno-racial hierarchy, most measures suggesting that other groups remain more distant ethno-racial outsiders than Muslims in both Britain and France.

From International Ideas to Domestic Policies: Educational Multiculturalism in England and France

Political scientists are increasingly interested in the interaction between ideas and policies. Some research has used ideas as independent variables to demonstrate how a change in ideas has determined a policy outcome.1 Other studies have looked at how different national institutions funnel, shape, and adopt similar international ideas.2 This study follows in the second tradition by focusing on the application of the idea of multiculturalism to education policy in England and France. Multiculturalism first appeared on the education policy agenda in the 1960s, and it remains a hotly debated and much discussed topic today.3 Whereas multiculturalism blossomed in the ethnically diverse United States, it was often contested and fell on sometimes fertile, sometimes rocky soil in the more historically homogeneous western European nations. England and France reacted to multiculturalism in particularly different manners. English education policy took on board many of the common changes advocated by supporters of multiculturalism, and multiculturalism is now generally accepted in many English educational institutions. In contrast, France has only grudgingly accepted very small pieces of the multicultural agenda, preferring to maintain education as a sphere for assimilating immigrants. This divergence is curious given the similarities of the two countries. Each experienced relatively large-scale ethnic minority immigration in the decades following World War II, and policymakers in each country were exposed to educational multiculturalism through participation in international educational networks. Why have England and France responded so differently to the idea of multicultural education? The key to this puzzle lies in the interaction between two variables: the different structure of gatekeepers controlling the access of ideas into the policy process and the different priors of gatekeepers in each country. Institutionally, England has a much more decentralized educational system than does France. Decentralization increases the number of decision-making gatekeepers who control the access of new ideas into the policy system. Counterintuitively, a greater number of gatekeepers may lead to an increased likelihood of policy change. Yet the number of gatekeepers alone does not explain the divergence between England and France. Policy gatekeepers must also have the inclination to adopt new ideas. Policymakers are not blank slates on which actors try to write new ideas into

Media Portrayals of Minorities: Muslims in British Newspaper Headlines, 2001–2012

To better understand the public portrayal of minorities, we propose a new and systematic procedure for measuring the standing of different groups that relies on the tone of daily newspaper headlines containing the names of minority groups. This paper assesses the portrayal of Muslims in the British print media between 2001 and 2012, focusing especially on testing scholarly propositions that Muslims are depicted in a systematically negative way. We compare the tone of newspaper headlines across time and across newspaper type and compare the portrayal of Muslims to that of Jews and Christians. We do not find support for arguments that Muslims are consistently portrayed in a negative manner in the British media as a whole. However, our data demonstrate that headlines in right-leaning newspapers are more negative than those in left-leaning newspapers, and that Muslims are consistently portrayed more negatively than Jews and frequently more negatively than Christians. These findings thus offer a more nuanced understanding of British newspaper portrayals of Muslims than exists in the contemporary scholarly literature.

Social Research and ‘Race’ Policy Framing in Britain and France

This article assesses the effect of social research on the origins and evolution of race frames and race policy-making in Britain and France. Social research can provide new ideas and information within an existing system, and in so doing, it may spur a shift in policy frames. Social research may seldom be the most important influence on policy frames or policy outcomes, but its timing, its fit with the interests of powerful actors and the ways in which it becomes institutionalised in the national political scene can increase the odds of its affecting policy trajectories and can enhance its potential for resolving the dilemmas that often accompany debates about migration and integration in contemporary Europe.

State Responses to ‘Muslim’ Violence: A Comparison of Six West European Countries

This essay examines contemporary state responses to associations between Muslims and violence in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. It stresses the critical role of violence as a spur to recent policy developments, but argues that state actions since 9/11 have to be seen in the context of rising associations between Muslims and violence since the 1980s. States have responded to these associations with an overlapping three-pronged strategy that consists of enacting generic anti-violence policies, repressing religious violence and integrating religious minorities.

Migrants, Minorities and the Media: Information, Representations and Participation in the Public Sphere

Scholars of political communication have stressed the critical role of the media in modern liberal democracies (Bennett and Entman 2001; Chong and Druckman 2007; Koopmans and Statham 2010; McCombs 2004; Norris 2000). The media inform the public, provide a communicative bridge between political and social actors, influence perceptions of pressing issues, depict topics and people in particular ways and may shape individuals’ political views and participation. Despite this critical role, students of migrants and minorities have rarely used systematic media analysis in their scholarship. We believe that the time is ripe to review how a focus on the media can help advance a field that traditionally has been explored with other types of data. In this special issue, we showcase a diverse set of new research to illustrate the ways in which media analysis advances our knowledge about migrants and minorities in the public sphere. Understanding the factors that shape media coverage of migrants and minorities, as well as the effect of that coverage on public attitudes, policy outcomes or social relations, has a modest but growing foundation. To further advance our knowledge, this special issue is oriented around a comparative approach. Media coverage may be copious or minimal, positive or negative, social or political. These axes of difference can be examined across time; across regions, countries or cities; between media outlets of different types, political stripes or economic ownership structures; and with reference to a wide range of migrant or minority groups and issues, spanning asylum to security, integration to racial discrimination. Comparative analysis connects

Hate Crime Policy in Western Europe Responding to Racist Violence in Britain, Germany, and France

In recent years, the British, German, and French states have increasingly turned their attention to the problem of racist violence. Yet in spite of their common participation in the European Union, each country has pursued a distinctive path in response to such hate crimes. Britain has focused primarily on policing and on the judicial process for prosecuting racially aggravated offenses, Germany has devoted substantial resources to civil society groups dedicated to countering right-wing extremism, and France has taken high-profile symbolic actions and has begun adapting its educational policies to address racist violence. This article argues that developing effective policies depends on learning best practices from other states but that it also requires being responsive to the concerns of domestic actors who face specific problems and who suggest possible solutions.

Immigration and Integration Studies in Western Europe and the United States: The Road Less Traveled and a Path Ahead

This article examines the significant contributions of recent research on immigration and integration in Europe and North America and highlights the potential of such research to influence the social sciences. The first part of the article advances a framework for analyzing four types of scholarship and then applies that framework to the study of immigration and integration. Type 1 scholarship develops theoretical or conceptual insights for scholars within a subfield, type 2 tests or refines theories that are specific to a particular dimension of the subfield, type 3 imports broader comparative or social scientific concepts to reshape the study of a topic within a subfield, and type 4 uses evidence from a subfield to develop theoretical tools that can be applied more broadly in the social sciences. The second part of the article reviews four books that highlight the empirical frontiers of immigration and integration research. Each book tends to epitomize one of the four types of scholarship, but together they demonstrate the possibility of making contributions on multiple registers. The article concludes by suggesting promising frontiers within the immigration and integration subfield and by defining the concept of a comparative politics of identity and sketching out its terrain. Since immigration and integration researchers are centrally interested in the role of identity in politics, they have the potential to be pivotal in advancing this new arena of inquiry.