What Explains Voting for DENK: Issues, Discrimination or In-group Favouritism?

2024/09/11 by Sanne van Oosten, Liza Mügge, Armèn Hakhverdian +1 · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Electoral Systems and Political Participation

paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/00344893.2024.2387011

openalex publication_date 2024/09/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02

Abstract

Why do ethnic and religious minorities vote for DENK? DENK is the first pro-Turkey and pro-Islam party represented in Dutch parliament, led by Turkish- and Moroccan-origin politicians who openly profess to practicing Islam. Drawing on an original survey (N= 905) among Dutch voters in which we oversampled those with Turkish, Moroccan and Surinamese roots, we put three possible explanations to the test: issues, discrimination and in-group favouritism. Each subsample is religiously mixed and includes Muslims and/or Christians and voters who are not religious. While ethnic in-group favouritism, feelings of belonging in the Netherlands, experiences with discrimination and issues sometimes explain voting for DENK, Muslim in-group favouritism is the decisive factor. These findings contribute to understanding voting behaviour in increasingly religiously diverse European immigration societies.

Citations

• Immigration, Europe and the ‘new’ cultural dimension
• Advantages and Disadvantages of Cognitive Heuristics in Political Decision Making
• Race/Ethnicity in Candidate Experiments: a Meta-Analysis and the Case for Shared Identification
• Who favor in-group politicians? In-group voting in France, Germany and the Netherlands and the challenges to the descriptive and substantive representation of Muslims

Discussions

• I was also interviewed about the Muslim vote and the voting potential for DENK in NRC👇 What does DENK mean for the representation of Muslims? Here is the paper we published on DENK: doi.org/10.1080 [bsky, 4 points, 0 comments]

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