The Issue of Muslims and Islam in Party Competition in Germany

The recent immigration of refugees particularly from the Middle East to Europe,has once again put the integration of Muslims and Islam on top of the politicalagenda in European immigration countries.Both religious and secular parties restarted a debate on questions that many believed to have been settled in the wake of secularization: the status of religion(s) in the public sphere, claims made by religious groups as well as the compatibility of religious beliefs and thevalues of liberal democracies.However, whereas researchers have increasingly dealt with the issue of immigrant integration in party politics in general, studies onparty competition with regard to the integration of Muslims in particular have been scarce.This paper contributesto filling this research gap by analysing the way mainstream parties in Germany deal with the issue of Muslims and Islam in their electoral manifestos. Using the convenient testing ground of Germany’s multi-level political system where similar parties compete for votes on both the federal level and in 16 states.Whereas the states are very similar regarding potential confounding factors such as institutional set-up and party systems they provide for promising variance of electoral markets, socio-economic conditions and aspects of party competition such as the presence of radical right-wing niche parties.Using this lab-like testing ground we investigate what positions parties take on Islam and how these positions are framed. Analysing thousands ofstatements with regard to Islam from over 668electoral manifestos and coalition agreements during 115federal and regional elections between 1990 and 2018we ask to what extent positions of parties on Islam and Muslim immigration are influenced both by party political differences as well as situational (e.g. terrorist attacks) and structural (e.g. share of immigrant/Muslim population) factors.In order to analyse how parties talk about the issue in their manifestos,we subsumed all references under four different dimensions: ‘security/terrorism’;’ gender inequality’, ‘extremism/illiberalism’, and ‘islamophobia’.