Next GRITIM-UPF seminar by Marc Helbling (University of Bamberg, Germany):

Date: 18th April 2018

Time: 18:00

Place: UPF - Campus Ciutadella (Roger de Llùria Building, Room 40:213).

Title: “Explaining Islamophobia with Survey Experiments: Liberal Values, Religiosity and Policies”

Abstract: What citizens think about Muslim immigrants is of great importance for some of the most pressing challenges facing Western democracies. The aim of this lecture is to present and test different arguments on how to explain negative attitudes towards Muslim immigrants by means of survey experiments. To advance our understanding of what “Islamophobia” really is in the first part of the talk a vignette study is presented that allows to study to what extent Islamophobia is a dislike based on immigrants` ethnic background, their religious identity or their specific religious behaviour. In the second part two explanatory factors at the individual level are discussed: liberal values and religiosity. It appears that these two factors have different effects depending on whether the ethnicity, religion or religiosity of Muslim immigrants is emphasized. In the third part, the effects of the policy context are investigated. It appears that attitudes depend on how states support religious matters in general and to what extent authorities support Muslim claims. It is shown that disagreement with elite decision is a source of citizens’ resentment toward Muslim immigrants and leads to increased polarization.

Bio: Marc Helbling is full professor in Political Sociology at the University of Bamberg and a Research Fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center where he has previously been head of the Emmy-Noether research group ‘Immigration Policies in Comparison’ (IMPIC). He was a visiting lecturer or scholar among others at the Universities of Princeton, Harvard, Oxford, Sydney, New York and the European University Institute. He studied political science at the University of Lausanne and holds a PhD from the University of Zurich. His research fields include immigration and citizenship policies, xenophobia/islamophobia and right-wing populism. His work has appeared in political science journals (e.g., British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of Political Research) and sociology journals (e.g., European Sociological Review, Social Forces). He was an elected member of The Young Academy at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He is the Newsletter Editor of the American Political Science Association Organized Section on Migration and Citizenship and serves on the editorial boards of Social Science Research and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

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