Situating Muslims’ political trust: A cross-national comparison in Western Europe

In Western Europe, politicians and media express concerns about whether Muslims feel part of liberal democracies and trust parliament and government, generally made up of established parties. Although it is often assumed that Muslims do not (fully) accept the political system, previous research is actually inconclusive on whether Islamic religiosity hampers political trust. Current study dives into this complex association by studying over five thousand Muslims across 18 Western Europe countries. It makes two contributions. First, instead of comparing Muslims to non-Muslims, we address Muslims in specific to gain understanding in how various dimensions of religiosity -individual identification, prayer and mosque attendance- relate to political trust. Second, we introduce and test institutional conditions that can buffer or aggravate Islamic religiosity’s impact on political trust using an embedded-agency framework. We theorize how formal boundaries (e.g. the party systems’ proportionality) and informal boundaries (e.g. the presence of PRR parties) affect how Islamic religiosity translates into political trust. Using a unique harmonized dataset using ESS, EVS and WVS data, multilevel analyses present insight in these potentially context-dependent relationships. This study thus offers previously absent insights in what dimensions of Islamic religiosity relate to Muslims’ political trust in Western Europe, and under which conditions.