A key virtue of democratic citizenship is participation in the political life of the nation. Political engagement is central for the functioning and vitality of democracies and is a key indicator of the overall inclusion of different social groups (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady Reference Verba, Schlozman and Brady1995). However, it is well known that citizens do not participate in politics at equal levels, and this has consequences for whose voices are heard and who gets to influence policy. While scholars have paid considerable attention to explaining why some groups—in particular those with higher education and income levels—participate more than others, an emerging dividing line in political activity in most Western European societies has received much less scholarly attention: the one between the children of immigrants and the majority population. This is partly because of a lack of data, and partly because existing theories fall short in addressing the particular political environment minority youths face in contemporary Europe.
With some cross-country variation, children of immigrants turn out to vote at substantially lower levels than their majority peers (Herzog-Punzenberger et al. Reference Herzog-Punzenberger, Fibbi, Very-Larrucea, DeSipio, Mollenkopf, Crul and Mollenkopf2012, 199; Bhatti and Hansen Reference Bhatti and Hansen2017). In the Danish case that I analyze, a series of studies since 1997 have demonstrated that not only do the children of immigrants turn out to vote less than majority Danes, their electoral participation is even lower than that of immigrants (Elklit et al. Reference Elklit, Møller, Svensson and Togeby2004; Bhatti and Hansen Reference Bhatti and Hansen2010; Bhatti et al. Reference Bhatti, Dahlgaard, Hansen and Hansen2014; Reference Bhatti, Dahlgaard, Hansen and Hansen2016). In addition, the minority/majority gap has widened since 1997—amounting to thirty-seven percentage points in 2015—even though minority youths are advancing their incorporation in other domains of society, e.g., education (Fallesen Reference Fallesen2017; Bhatti and Hansen Reference Bhatti and Hansen2017). Despite Danish institutional conditions being conducive for minority participation (including a low electoral barrier, proportional election system, and automatic registration of voters), the gap with the majority is substantial and much greater than for any other group traditionally a focus regarding political inequality, including the economically and socially marginalized.Footnote 1 Given that political habits developed in young adulthood tend to stick over a lifetime (Franklin Reference Franklin2004, 59-90),Footnote 2 these patterns could become enduring, and, if not tackled, result in an accumulation of political grievances and permanent (self-) exclusion.
Existing theories have limited reach in addressing the minority/majority turnout gap. Academic studies of immigrants’ lower levels of political participation—within which the second generation is typically analyzed, if included in academic studies—focus on factors related to the migration experience (Ramakrishnan and Espenshade Reference Ramakrishnan and Espenshade2001; Cho Reference Cho1999; Cho, Gimpel and Dyck Reference Cho, Gimpel and Dyck2006). These factors—e.g., socialization in another, sometimes undemocratic, political system; limited language skills; limited social networks; restricted access to information channels—do not apply well to the native-born children of immigrants. The standard set of individual-level factors—education, income, and age—that are the focus of traditional resource-based explanations are also limited. Granted, children of immigrants in most Western European countries are, compared to the majority population, young (hence my use of the term “minority youths”) and tend to come from less privileged backgrounds, but research shows that a substantial gap in turnout remains even when controlling for demographic and socioeconomic factors (Bhatti and Hansen Reference Bhatti and Hansen2017).Footnote 3 As Fraga (Reference Fraga2018, 70) concludes based on similar findings for racial disparities in the United States, the fact that some ethno-racial minorities are not as “responsive” to greater income, higher education, and growing older as the white majority suggests “differential willingness to take on such costs [of voting], or the presence of intervening factors outside the domain of sociodemographic traits”Footnote 4 (see also Kasinitz et al. Reference Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, Waters and Holdaway2008, 274-299).
While scholarly attention has been limited and existing theories fall short, the political quiescence of minority youths has not escaped politicians’ attention. Commenting on low turnout rates for minority youths, former Danish Minister of Integration Birthe Rønn Hornbech concluded that “they have not understood what it means to be a fellow citizen” (Sheikh 2010); that is, minority youths are not properly inclined toward democratic citizenship. Lacking further evidence, however, we are left with questions of why minority youths should be less willing to take on the costs of voting or less capable of or motivated to be full democratic citizens.
In this article, I go behind the minority/majority gap and argue that the individual-level factors that are the focus of existing theories of voter turnout cannot be properly understood without attention to the distinctly political forces that shape citizens’ relationships to politics. I draw on the sociologically informed policy-feedback literature (Schneider and Ingram Reference Schneider and Ingram1993; Pierson Reference Pierson1993; Mettler and Soss Reference Mettler and Soss2004), which states that the way policies construct different target groups can be consequential for how members of those groups think of politics and their own status as citizens, in turn affecting political behavior. The Danish political context allows me to zoom in on these interpretive effects, because it combines institutional and resource-related factors that traditionally contribute to high minority turnout with highly salient negative political targeting of immigrant minorities (Jensen Reference Jensen2016; Goodman Reference Goodman2014; Simonsen Reference Simonsen2019).
Analyzing seventy-one qualitative interviews with minority and majority youths of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, I show the centrality of policy signals and political discourse in shaping young citizens’ ideas about politics and their own political and societal status. At the same time, I warn against interpreting minority youths’ political quiescence as political apathy, demonstrating that dissociation from politics can be an effort to take back power by refusing to have one’s worth defined by politicians. What leads to a loss of electoral influence can be understood as a politically motivated act and can be experienced as empowering. In a broader sense, I show the limits of our classic concepts of political interest and political (dis)engagement because they are built so much on the majority population’s experience.
Are Minority Youths Politically Apathetic?
Partly due to the lack of studies with specific focus on the children of immigrants, and partly because these children are only now coming of age in any significant number in most European societies, we know relatively little about their political participation and their relationship to politics more generally. Specifically, little research and still less theorizing address how their particular position may affect their relationship to politics. As explained earlier, theories of immigrants’ political quiescence do not travel well across generations, and traditional resource-based explanations focusing on demographic and socioeconomic factors only get us so far.
Demographic and socioeconomic factors, particularly education, have such a prominent place in the political participation literature because of their association with more proximate reasons for political participation, the strongest and most consistently influential of these being political interest (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady Reference Verba, Schlozman and Brady1995). Political interest is conceptualized as part of the general phenomenon of “psychological engagement” in politics; that is, following politics, caring about what happens, and being “concerned with who wins and loses” (ibid., 345-347). In addition, feeling a sense of civic duty to vote has been shown to contribute independently to explaining who shows up on election day (Blais Reference Blais2000; Blais and St-Vincent Reference Blais and St-Vincent2011). As Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (Reference Verba, Schlozman and Brady1995, 361) conclude, “what matters most for going to the polls is not the resources at voters’ disposal but, rather, their civic orientations, especially their interest in politics.”
In line with some politicians’ accusations against minority youths, this suggests that if socioeconomic factors cannot account for the minority/majority gap, it is because minority youths lack the civic values and dispositions built into the classic model of voter turnout. As the authors of the comprehensive Danish Power and Democracy Study asserted after concluding that standard explanations fall short in explaining the turnout gap, “they [immigrants and their children] probably do not feel obliged by the norm to vote” (Elklit et al. Reference Elklit, Møller, Svensson and Togeby2004, 77). Implied is the notion that the alleged “civic deficit” is the fault of minority citizens, a view reminiscent of older “culture of poverty” arguments, which similarly asserted that the poor fail to empower themselves because they are trapped in a culture of passivity (Campbell Reference Campbell2012, 335).
While data on minority youths’ civic orientations is limited, a few observations suggest a more complex picture. First, challenging the view that minority youths are generally politically apathetic (but potentially indicating a form of substitution between formal and informal participation), some evidence suggests that the gap is smaller (and for some types of participation even reversed) for non-electoral activities such as demonstrating and signing petitions (Liversage and Christensen Reference Liversage and Christensen2017; Quintelier Reference Quintelier2009, 929; Integrationsministeriet 2017). Second, minority youths appear to be no less (and often more) committed to democratic values than majority youths (Maxwell Reference Maxwell2010; Integrationsministeriet 2017). Still, there is a lack of studies that go beyond establishing the existence of a gap to ask how minority and majority youths’ positionality shapes their relationships to politics.
A small handful of studies have focused on the role of identity and discrimination issues as important for immigrants’ inclinations to act politically (Bilodeau Reference Bilodeau2017; Schildkraut Reference Schildkraut2005; Kasinitz et al. Reference Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, Waters and Holdaway2008, 298; Oskooii Reference Oskooii2016). Social discrimination is suggested to damage minorities’ sense of being “an integral part of the larger society,” in turn leading them to “believe that they are incapable of taking meaningful action” (Oskooii Reference Oskooii2018, 6-7). These studies are important in that they move beyond individual-level accounts of political engagement, but they have not considered the distinctly political forces that may shape both identities and experiences of discrimination. Drawing on the policy-feedback literature, I seek to contribute to this research agenda by studying how citizen identities are shaped by and made relevant for politics, including the role that politics plays as a source through which citizens learn about how they are seen in society more broadly.
Policy Feedback and Target Groups
Policy-feedback scholars argue that the design of public policy is important for people’s sense of membership and status, with consequences for the political engagement of differently targeted groups. In modern welfare states, it is obvious that public policy is a redistributive tool that allocates resources to different groups of citizens, altering the costs and benefits of political participation (e.g., providing politically relevant resources such as income and time and creating higher political stakes, incentivizing particular groups of citizens to engage politically; see, e.g., Campbell Reference Campbell2003). However, policy-feedback scholars highlight the interpretive, or signaling, effects of policy as potentially equally or even more important for shaping participation than resource effects (Pierson Reference Pierson1993). This is so because public policy “sends powerful messages about who really matters in politics, what kind of game politics is, and whether groups with certain identities can expect to receive anything positive from government” (Ingram Reference Ingram, Soss, Hacker and Mettler2007, 246; Mettler and Soss Reference Mettler and Soss2004).
One of the most important messages embedded in policy design concerns the social construction of the target group in question. Target groups may be positively or negatively constructed based on stereotypes about their social value or deservingness and perceptions of their political power (Schneider and Ingram Reference Schneider and Ingram1993), resulting in four main types:
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• Advantaged (positive and strong, such as the elderly)
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• Dependents (positive and weak, such as children)
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• Contenders (negative and strong, such as the rich)
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• Deviants (negative and weak, such as criminals)
Members of different target groups receive different policy messages about their status as citizens and what they deserve from government. For instance, advantaged target groups are told “that they are good, intelligent people. When they receive benefits from government, it is not a special favour or because of their need but because they are contributing to public welfare” (Schneider and Ingram Reference Schneider and Ingram1993, 341). Therefore, members of this group are positively oriented toward the political system and they believe politics is usually fair and that political engagement makes a difference. Deviants, in contrast, are told “that they are bad people whose behavior constitutes a problem for others”; they feel that government is unfair and “belongs to someone else” (ibid., 342). In particular, Schneider and Ingram argue that deviants will fail to organize and take action because the policies that target them are stigmatizing and individualizing. This makes political engagement unattractive, damages their political agency (i.e., the sense of being capable of political action), and prevents target group members from seeing their common political interests or the structural causes of their problems (Ingram Reference Ingram, Soss, Hacker and Mettler2007, 250-251).
Policy-feedback scholars focus on government programs, in particular social welfare programs, as arenas where people learn about their status as citizens and how politics works (Campbell Reference Campbell2003; Soss Reference Soss1999; Reference Soss, Schneider and Ingram2005). Citizens’ experiences with government in these programs—e.g., with efficient bureaucracy versus endless waiting; praise versus punishment; logical and procedurally fair versus arbitrary decision-making—create political lessons that they draw on beyond the specific encounter (Bruch, Ferree, and Soss Reference Bruch, Ferree and Soss2010; Soss Reference Soss, Schneider and Ingram2005; Reference Soss1999). These studies have generated valuable insights into the factors that shape feedback effects—such as whether a program is universal or means-tested—but they often fail to take account of the fact that “individuals live in a world of multiple jurisdictions and are affected by multiple policies at once” (Campbell Reference Campbell2012, 347). In addition, because they focus on specific and proximate policies, these studies likely overemphasize the tangible and material effects and miss the generalized experience that citizens deduce from different types of policies and political signals.
In this study, instead of predefining target groups by selecting study participants based on enrollment in government programs, I inductively investigated the types of political lessons interviewees drew on when talking about their impressions of politics, and whether and how they perceive themselves to be political targets. In doing so, I am responding to recent calls for work that focuses on the subjective perceptions and lived experiences of citizens in order to bring us closer to understanding feedback mechanisms (Campbell Reference Campbell2012; van Ingelgom and Dupuy Reference van Ingelgom and Dupuy2020).Footnote 5 This shifts the unit of analysis from the level of policy in and of itself to how citizens experience politics. Starting from citizens’ conceptions, this analysis leads me to propose the concept of political feedback, encompassing—in addition to policies—political discourse more generally as a medium through which individuals learn about target group membership. I show that the interpretive effects of policies often go beyond the group specifically or concretely targeted because citizens interpret policies’ intent and broader symbolic meaning.
To foreshadow the findings, while minority youths in the study perceived themselves as negative political targets, few based this impression on direct encounters with specific policies. Instead, they interpreted the broader signals sent through various immigration and immigrant integration policies and political discourse that together communicated a message about minority youths’ unbelonging and unwantedness. Thus, while they are not direct concrete targets, they saw themselves as symbolically targeted. In contrast, most majority interviewees did not experience themselves as (positively or negatively) targeted because they are mostly subject to universal—and therefore hidden to them—welfare state policies. Nonetheless, the messages embedded in these policies about their entitlement and status positively influence their relationship to politics.
To be sure, other scholars have proposed that being negatively targeted may actually be politically mobilizing. Studies within the immigrant-integration literature based on survey (experimental) data have found that policies that negatively target particular groups of immigrants increase their motivations to vote (Pérez Reference Pérez2015; Pantoja, Ramirez, and Segura Reference Pantoja, Ramirez and Segura2001; Oskooii Reference Oskooii2016; Reference Oskooii2018). Oskooii (Reference Oskooii2018, 2) suggests that experiences with political discrimination—i.e., unfair laws and unfair treatment in encounters with government officials—makes “politics more salient, motivating individuals to act collectively” because such experiences raise victims’ political awareness. The policy-feedback perspective, on the other hand, suggests that whether people act in such cases is a function of whether they experience themselves as having political agency, which in turn is a product of the political construction of their target group. My study nuances both of these perspectives. In contrast to the political-discrimination perspective, my findings suggest that when the political attack is less tangible, appearing in the form of assaults on worth and status rather than resources and objective rights, it does make politics salient but often leads to abstention from, rather than participation in, electoral politics. In contrast to the policy-feedback perspective, however, I show that the mechanism leading to abstention is not necessarily a loss of political agency or a sense of political apathy. Instead, dissociation from politics can be a way of coping with negative targeting, and for some it can feel empowering. By inductively examining conceptions of politics and target group perceptions, this study nuances our understanding of the (mobilizing and demobilizing) mechanisms at play in political feedback and political discrimination.
The Danish Political Context
The Danish political context is ideal for zooming in on the interpretive effects of politics, as it offers seemingly good conditions for high minority turnout when it comes to the factors that are traditionally the focus of theories of political participation: the resources at citizens’ disposal and the institutional costs and pressures confronting them.
As mentioned, minority youths’ socioeconomic incorporation in Danish society has improved over the period where their turnout has been in decline (Fallesen Reference Fallesen2017). In particular, their social mobility has increased sharply since the mid-1990s, with rates now surpassing those of majority youths (Jensen, Andersen, and Pihl Reference Jensen, Andersen and Pihl2019). Likewise, residential segregation of ethnic minorities has decreased, which means that no municipalities today have a high degree of co-ethnic concentration (Hassani Reference Hassani2019). These developments underline the puzzle of minority youths’ low turnout.
In addition, the Danish institutional context is composed of a set of factors that should be conducive for minority turnout. The low barrier for party entry into Parliament (2% of the vote) and the proportional election system make it comparatively easy for minority groups to gain political voice, and automatic registration of voters makes it relatively less costly (in terms of time and mental resources) to participate. These conditions have traditionally led to high (and stable) voter turnout (around 86% for parliamentary elections, and 70% for regional and municipal elections), including among groups with fewer resources (Bhatti et al. Reference Bhatti, Dahlgaard, Hansen and Hansen2016; see also endnote 1). In other words, the Danish political system appears to be effective in incorporating marginalized groups.
The high turnout rates have been taken as evidence that voting is a strong social norm that applies across the Danish population (Elklit et al. Reference Elklit, Møller, Svensson and Togeby2004), and cross-national survey evidence confirms that Danes feel a comparatively strong sense of civic duty to vote (Wattenberg Reference Wattenberg2012, 127). Young majority citizens, whose electoral participation is a concern in many other countries, even increased their turnout for recent elections following coordinated campaign initiatives, leading experts to proclaim that “the young are more democratic than ever” (TV2Fyn 2017). Living in a state with a strong legacy of voting participation has been shown to contribute positively to first- and second-generation immigrants’ voter turnout because of the socializing effects of political culture (Ramakrishnan and Espenshade Reference Ramakrishnan and Espenshade2001). However, the Danish case appears to challenge this wisdom, even though political institutions signal openness to immigrants.Footnote 6 In addition, while first-generation immigrants’ access to citizenship is increasingly restricted (cf. the next paragraph), the second generation has easier access. More than 80% of 16–24 year old children of immigrants are Danish citizens (Statistics Denmark Reference Denmark2019), signaling their own interest in being—and the state’s willingness to include them as—formal members of the political community. Why this is not reflected on election day is difficult to understand, based on existing theoretical perspectives.
In contrast to these conducive factors, the contemporary political environment can be characterized as hostile to immigrant minorities, both in terms of actual policies and political rhetoric. While universality is a guiding principle of the Danish welfare state, this principle is increasingly curbed for new citizens. Especially since 2001, asylum rights and requirements to obtain permanent residence and citizenship have been tightened. By 2019, Denmark had moved toward one of the most restrictive policy positions in Western Europe (Simonsen Reference Simonsen, Christiansen, Elklit and Nedergaard2020; Jensen Reference Jensen2016; Goodman Reference Goodman2014). These policies do not target the children of immigrants directly, and in most cases not even the study participants’ parents (given that most came to Denmark at least twenty years ago), but my study shows that the interpretive effects can still be significant.
What is more, recent and more narrowly targeted policies have considerable symbolic clout (indeed, critics have labeled them “symbolic politics” to indicate that they are produced mainly to send signals, not to tackle actual problems), among these the 2018 ban on face covering in public spaces—colloquially “the burqa ban”—and the “Ghetto Plan.” Since 2010, successive governments have produced a list of housing areas denoted as “ghettos,” based on criteria like unemployment rate, education, and crime among inhabitants. One criterion—ethnic composition of the area—is fixed (i.e., necessary): Only if 50% or more of the inhabitants in an area are “non-Western immigrants or descendants” does it enter the list. In this connection, it is worth noting the focus in political discourse on “descendants” (efterkommere); that is, children born in Denmark of immigrant parents. Not counted as part of the “ethnically Danish” population in official statistics, this group makes up 3% of the Danish population overall and 10% of the population under age twenty-five (Statistics Denmark Reference Denmark2019). “Non-Western” is a residual category used in official statistics for individuals who themselves or whose parents do not come from EU28, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, Vatican state, North America, Australia, or New Zealand. Politicians often explicitly note that restrictive immigration and immigrant-integration measures are meant to target “non-Western” immigrants because of the suggested incompatibility of this group’s values and Danish norms (Jensen, Fernández, and Brochmann Reference Jensen, Fernández and Brochmann2017).
Finally, in addition to restrictive policies, researchers have demonstrated that immigration and integration issues are extremely salient in Danish official political rhetoric, more so than in other Western European countries (Simonsen Reference Simonsen2019). This discussion indicates the potential for feedback effects through the signals sent to minority and majority youths about their differential worth and belonging.
Comparative Interview-Based Study
I utilize the dual potential of qualitative interviews to offer in-depth insights into the thoughts, beliefs, and experiences of interviewees and to allow for systematic comparison across groups of interviewees (Lamont and Swidler Reference Lamont and Swidler2014, 158-159). By comparing minority and majority youths, I can examine the degree to which politics affects young adults’ lives differently, depending on how they are targeted politically. It should be noted that the balance of qualitative evidence reported in (especially the latter part of) the analysis will be skewed toward minority interviewees’ perspectives as it is their relationship to politics that we know the least about in advance and which challenges established understandings of central theoretical concepts.
The study relies on seventy-one in-depth interviews; forty-three with minority youths and twenty-eight with majority youths (mean age: 20.5 years), conducted in autumn 2018 and spring 2019. Majority interviewees were born in Denmark of non-immigrant parents. Most minority interviewees were born in Denmark; a few arrived in Denmark at a young age (0–4 years; one was 9 at the time of arrival). Their parents are all immigrants and—mirroring population statistics (Statistics Denmark, Reference Denmark2019)—mostly from Middle Eastern and African countries, with a few from other world regions. With forty-three interviewees I am not able to tease out the “effect” of particular ethnic origins or migration motives, but to the extent that interviewees of various (“non-Western”) backgrounds share political experiences and beliefs, there is reason to assign this agreement to how they are targeted as minorities (a point I return to in the conclusion).
Given the centrality assigned to class/socioeconomic resources in traditional accounts of political participation, the study focuses on minority and majority youths of similar class backgrounds, in particular working- and lower-middle-class homes (the class backgrounds of most minority youths, cf. Sabiers and Harboe Reference Sabiers and Harboe2014). The sample is gender-balanced, and most interviewees lived with their parents or with friends in the centers or suburbs of Aarhus or Copenhagen, the two biggest cities in Denmark. Voter turnout in Aarhus and Copenhagen, including the minority/majority gap, mirrors the rest of the country (Bhatti et al. Reference Bhatti, Dahlgaard, Hansen and Hansen2016). I do not claim to represent the entire population of minority and majority youths in Denmark, but I use the study to uncover differences that may have general import for our understanding of democratic citizenship and political participation.
Three interviewers, all women in their mid- to late-twenties, conducted the interviews. To secure open conversation without interviewees feeling judged, two interviewers of minority (Middle Eastern) background conducted interviews with minority interviewees, and being of majority background, I conducted interviews with majority interviewees. Online appendix 1 contains further details about interviewee characteristics and recruitment.
The confidential interviews lasted between 45 minutes and 1 hour and 45 minutes, and took place at a location of the respondent’s choosing (typically in a quiet room at their school/workplace or the public library). The interview guide (enclosed in online appendix 2), which was identical for minority and majority interviewees, started with interviewee self-presentation, characterization of Danish society, and what it means to be a good citizen. Politics was not explicitly introduced until halfway through the interviews, but politics had often been mentioned in some way in the interview’s first part, especially in interviews with minority youths (a point I will return to in the analysis).Footnote 7 The section on politics included questions about interviewees’ ideas about what politics is and how it works, impressions of politicians, whether they (and their friends and family) are politically active in different ways, and their motivations for or against being so, including their political interest. At no point did interviewers ask on their own initiative about target group perceptions or immigration issues or policies. If these topics became a focus of conversation, it was only after the interviewee had introduced them.
Each interview was audio recorded, transcribed verbatim (by student assistants), and coded by me (in the QDA software program NVivo). I adopted the flexible coding approach proposed by Deterding and Waters (Reference Deterding and Waters2018) for systematic coding of large numbers of in-depth interviews. This approach involves a first round of indexing (into broad themes) and memo writing for all interviews, and a second round of detailed analytical coding within each theme. The analytical coding focused on interviewees’ ideas about what politics is and whether they saw themselves as politically targeted. For comparison purposes, I produced a number of analytical matrices.
Before examining the qualitative evidence in depth, table 1 shows that the sample reproduces the minority/majority gap in the populationFootnote 8 (online appendix 3 includes an overview of interviewees’ non-electoral participation). While the two groups’ “turnout rates” are about ten percentage points higher than those based on population statistics, note that most interviewees were enrolled in education at the time of interview, a factor known to contribute positively to turnout (Highton and Wolfinger Reference Highton and Wolfinger2001). In light of this and the potential skewness in the study’s recruitment of people who are more engaged in thinking and talking about societal issues, these patterns do not seem out of proportion. The fact that interviewees who do not vote or do so only sometimes were comfortable enough to say this in the interview situation offers a unique opportunity for gaining insights into the thoughts and conceptions behind the minority/majority turnout gap, as well as potential differences within the minority group.
Table 1 Participation in elections (percent)
Note: Based on qualitative coding of interview transcripts.
In the following, interviewees appear under aliases to protect their anonymity.
Conceptions of Politics
Interviewer (I): Is there something you think is typical of politics? Where you think “that’s politics”?
Respondent (R): * Typical? … Well, when I think about politics right now, I think about immigrants. Yes. When there is talk about immigrants in po … from politicians … then it’s Islam, terrorism, and all that […] I cannot recall the last time politics concerned the environment or the economy.
*Fatema, female, 21, came to Denmark at the age of 2, parents from Somalia.
Politics was explicitly introduced as a topic of conversation about midway through the interviews, with the interviewer asking: “I would also like to talk to you more specifically about politics. So, could you start by telling me, what is the first thing that comes to mind when I say ‘politics’?” Like Fatema, the most common immediate response from minority interviewees had something to do with “immigrants.” In fact, many minority interviewees had already mentioned this theme earlier in conversations about their impressions of Danish society. The notion was that Danish society is divided into “immigrants” and “Danes,” and that politicians were (at least partly) responsible for this division through their political messages (see also endnote 7). Immigration and immigrants were much less salient themes in interviews with majority youths,Footnote 9 who generally mentioned fewer specific policies and talked about politics more abstractly, with typical associations being “voting,” “left-right,” “parties and politicians,” or political institutions such as Folketinget (Parliament).
Majority and minority interviewees did share some neutral/positive associations with politics, in particular “democracy”/“rule of the people” (folkestyre) (just above 40% in both groups), and “debate”/“discussion” (around 25% in both groups). At this abstract level, politics was seen as citizens participating in and listening to “arguments about whether to do this or that” and selecting the positions and candidates they find best. However, minority and majority interviewees differed in their concrete assessment of Danish democracy. While many majority interviewees considered (Danish) politics to “work well” and “make society function” (25%), and be about “finding common solutions” (just below 20%), these themes had almost no tracking in minority interviews. The democratic system was an important and cherished characteristic of politics for minority interviewees but they experienced the actual political outcomes—“the solutions”—as less “common” than majority youths:
I: Can you tell me how politics works?
R:* Ehm … I believe, I believe it works in the way that some are heard mor … , there are, like, some people who are heard, and then there are others who are not heard […]
I: Who is it that is not heard in Danish society?
R: It’s the people who want the best, like, for both sides, I would say […] Those are the people I don’t think are heard enough. Because … there are some [politicians] who just want … all foreigners out […]
I: So who is heard the most?
R: Those who want foreigners out. It’s those I think I hear the most.
*Antonio, male, 21, born in Denmark, parents from Chile and Peru.
The sense of antagonism expressed by some minority interviewees like Antonio was not a theme in interviews with majority youths. This does not mean that majority youths did not have negative views of politicians. Almost 20% of majority interviewees associated politics with “quarrelling” and “mudslinging”; however, these were descriptions of politicians’ internal style of communication rather than something majority youths considered characteristic of politicians’ communication with or about citizens. In contrast, most of the talk about politicians in minority interviews was concerned with politicians identified as anti-immigrant or “racist,” for instance then Minister of Integration Inger Støjberg, members of the right-wing nationalist Danish People’s Party, and sometimes then Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen.
Target Group Perceptions
While immigration took up relatively little space in majority youths’ conceptions of politics compared to minority youths’, almost 30% of them did express the view that some politicians are “against foreigners.” However, this usually happened toward the end of the interviews when the interviewer asked whether there are politicians they do not like. In other words, anti-immigrant political messages were not as salient and did not affect their general view of politics and politicians to the degree it did for minority interviewees. In fact, beyond identifying some politicians as anti-immigrant, majority interviewees did not really talk about the idea that some groups are targets of policies (whether positively or negatively), and only two majority youths expressed seeing themselves as part of a political target group. For both, this impression relied on recent negative experiences with very specific (i.e., narrowly targeted) educational policies (cuts in state-sponsored subsidies for high school students living outside of their parents’ home, and eligibility requirements for high school).
The fact that most majority youths did not think of themselves—or other social groups—as political targets signals a degree of naïvety about how politics affects people’s lives. While many of them did think of politics as making society function, as noted earlier, they did not experience politics as visible in their everyday lives. This is also illustrated in the fact that majority youths mostly talked about politics in abstract terms and as something that happens at Christiansborg (the Parliament building). Politics was considered to affect systems and institutions rather than (directly) affecting citizens. Living in the Danish social-democratic welfare state, most of the policies that confront majority youths (e.g., health care and education) are universal in character and paid via (their parents’) tax contributions. This appears to have the effect of making the benefits they receive invisible to them, while simultaneously fostering a sense of entitlement in relation to receiving support from the state (Campbell Reference Campbell2012, 338-339), as reflected by the two majority interviewees who talked about negative policy experiences (and who expected better treatment from the state, e.g., higher levels of student subsidies). As such, majority interviewees’ conceptions of politics resemble Schneider and Ingram’s advantaged target group.
As discussed earlier, it is impossible to analyze minority youths’ conceptions of politics without noticing the salient place that “immigrants” or “foreigners” have as negative political targets. These interviewees—most of them born in Denmark, and the rest arrived in Denmark at a very young age—are not factually described by these terms, but more than 70% considered themselves as part of the immigrant target group and expressed the view that politicians are “against us.” While policy-feedback scholars have focused on enrolment in specific government programs as the source through which citizens learn about their target group membership, my analysis shows that very few minority youths based their membership perception on direct contact with targeted policies. Only six minority interviewees were directly affected by immigration/immigrant integration policies or had close relatives who were. Among these, the most common policy experience was living in one of the social housing areas on the government’s “ghetto list” and facing potential demolition of housing units as part of government initiatives to break up these areas. The affected interviewees perceived this as both “unfair” and “useless.” However, most minority interviewees did not have direct policy experiences but deduced their membership in the immigrant target group by a logic of extension:
I: Can you think of some form of politics, a situation or something political?
R: * Ehm, burqa, the burqa ban.
I: Yes, why the burqa ban?
R: Again, that’s … that, that’s what affects me the most.
I: Why does the burqa ban affect you?
R: Because, well, it doesn’t affect me like that, I actually don’t care, I don’t know, like, anyone who wears a burqa, but it’s part of my religion, and in that way it affects me a little too, I guess.
* Farouk, male, 23, came to Denmark at age 9, parents from Afghanistan.
As Farouk explains, even when policies do not directly target him or anyone he knows, he perceives himself as symbolically targeted by these policies, in this case because of his religion. This adds a layer to the idea that policies can have interpretive effects: policies create meaning not only (or, in this case, even mainly) through citizens’ direct encounters with government but through the signals they send about the boundaries between different categories of citizens. As such, the interpretive effects go beyond the group specifically targeted. Minority interviewees often mentioned a number of narrowly targeted policies (targeting, e.g., newly arrived refugees, criminals, burqa-wearing women, or “ghetto” residents), and by bundling these policies together under the “immigrant” term, interviewees expressed a sense of the term encompassing those citizens—including themselves—who are considered symbolically “foreign.” As another interviewee, Halima, said upon listing various immigrant integration policies, “it tells you that not everyone can be who they are in Denmark.”
To underline the point that direct contact with policies is not the only or main route to learning about target group membership, several interviewees based this perception more generally on political discourse. These interviewees talked about being unable to avoid exposure to political messages—on social media, in the news, or even “walking down the street and seeing those posters from DF [the Danish People’s Party]”—telling them about their status as negative targets.
The most common component in minority interviewees’ perceptions of the construction of the immigrant target group was being seen as not Danish (“enough”). In addition, interviewees often talked about the “stereotypes” and “generalizations” that politicians disseminate about immigrants, e.g., that they “do not take school seriously,” “don’t work,” “want to be on social welfare,” or “are criminals” or “terrorists.” These stereotypes portray members of the target group as a burden to society, and in some cases, even as dangerous. Many interviewees had a clear impression that politicians are “condescending and without sympathy,” that they “look down upon, and, you know, talk down to us,” that they present immigrants “not as fellow human beings, not as equals” but “are making immigrants feel that they are of no value.” The perceived portrayal of the immigrant target group as a burden, as worthless and powerless, matches Schneider and Ingram’s (Reference Schneider and Ingram1993) concept of “deviants.” However, as a corrective to the mechanism proposed by Schneider and Ingram, interviewees were very critical of politicians’ stereotypes and vocal in their critique of how the target group was constructed, refusing to be influenced by it in their self and group understandings.
While the consciousness of construction gave interviewees power to be critical of politicians and their “unfair” policies, it was difficult for them to escape the stereotypes because they felt that majority Danes had developed prejudices based on political messages (see also Simonsen Reference Simonsen2018). This indicates a type of spillover that expands the view on political feedback mechanisms. Target group constructions not only affect the self-image of target group members; as discussed earlier, it seems that many of the minority youths in this study managed to keep politicians’ portrayals of them at a distance. However, because “policies and programs … signal cultural citizenship, that is, the prevailing social pecking order, who belongs and is worthy of support, and who has a marginal status” (Lamont Reference Lamont2018, 434, emphasis added), political constructions of target groups may spread negative (or positive) stereotypes and affect everyday interactions between citizens. In other words, policy signals are not confined to the (symbolically) targeted groups; the broader public are likely to pick them up too. This multiplies the mechanisms that political feedback may work through and reminds scholars—and politicians—that it is difficult to isolate policy effects to a narrowly defined group of recipients.
That minority interviewees saw the prejudice of majority Danes as stemming from politicians contributes to studies of the importance of discrimination experiences for immigrant minorities’ political participation (Bilodeau Reference Bilodeau2017; Schildkraut Reference Schildkraut2005; Oskooii Reference Oskooii2016, Reference Oskooii2018). It suggests that experiences of social discrimination do not happen outside of the domain of politics but instead through a political lens. In fact, several interviewees considered it a deliberate strategy of politicians to gain popularity by proposing laws that are tough on immigrants. In Layla’s words, immigrants had become “elements to gain power.” This sense of being in the firing line stands in contrast to the positively but “invisibly” targeted majority youths’ naïvety about how politics can affect people’s everyday lives and how they are seen and treated by others.
Dissociating from Politics
The different political lessons and experiences with political targeting materialized in very different relationships to politics, most clearly demonstrated in minority and majority interviewees’ expressed interest in politics. When asked directly, more than half of minority interviewees outright denied interest in politics, whereas more than 30% of majority interviewees declared themselves “super interested.” As a quantitative expression of this, table 2 shows that the two groups are almost mirror images of each other. The contrast in political interest between the two groups is even greater than the turnout gap demonstrated in table 1.
Table 2 Political interest (percent)
Note: Based on qualitative coding of interview transcripts.
As discussed, political interest is consistently found to be one of the most robust proximate causes of political participation, and, indeed, these differences are associated with the voting patterns reported in table 1. None of the non-voting minority interviewees expressed being very interested in politics, and only two non-voting interviewees expressed being somewhat interested (voting is also patterned by political interest for majority youths, but because so few of them do not vote or only sometimes vote, only 1–2 interviewees appear in these cells). Lack of interest in politics was also the most common reason offered by minority youths themselves to explain their lack of political participation.
These results thus seem to return to standard explanations of political engagement and to support some politicians’ accusations that minority youths lack the type of civic identity that is necessary for being good democratic citizens. While “democracy” was an equally salient political association among minority and majority youths, and while minority youths often couched their critique of particular policies in a language of democratic (and human) rights, the critical observer might see this as paying lip service to democratic values without actually engaging in democracy. In addition, while more minority than majority interviewees expressed the view that voting is a civic duty (86% compared to 65%), this did not prevent some of them from abstaining (even while acknowledging the irony and their “double standards”). However, the standard understanding embedded in both scholarly and political perspectives of political interest as a trait or predisposition—that is, as an individual-level variable that is exogenous to the political environment—fails to address why minority youths declare themselves disinterested in politics. Instead, their lack of political interest is feedback on a political context experienced as hostile and treating them as a negative target. Thus, the mechanism that translates negative experiences with politics into abstention is not apathy but a form of protective (and, for some, empowering) dissociation. To appreciate this point, it is necessary to go behind what political disinterestedness entailed for minority and majority interviewees.
Disinterested minority interviewees declared Danish politics “boring,” “irrelevant,” and “all the same”: politicians take up “the same debates, the same [immigration-related] problems” again and again, without moving on to issues of real relevance and urgency (defined, in their view, as global poverty, international wars, and the environmental crisis). As such, while the statements about Danish politics being “boring” could be read as a sign of apathy, these interviewees expressed ideas and opinions about political issues that were important to them. In addition, these sentiments were rarely expressions of lacking political knowledge; as already discussed, minority interviewees revealed extensive knowledge of specific policies, policy proposals, and politicians. Nor was minority interviewees’ lack of political interest related to political news consumption. In fact, more minority interviewees (75%) than majority interviewees (61%) spoke about following news about society and politics almost every day or a couple of times a week. In other words, the bundle of orientations that political scientists usually think of as associated with political interest and which are treated as signaling “cognitive engagement” in politics (Zaller Reference Zaller1992; see also Verba, Schlozman, and Brady Reference Verba, Schlozman and Brady1995, 347) are not connected for these minority youths. Instead, I will argue that expressing political disinterestedness serves strategic purposes (consciously or not) that relieve minority youths from the burden of constantly being in politicians’ firing line, and for some can even be a way of reclaiming power:
I: What does it do to you when politicians talk like that [negatively] about immigrants?
R: * Well, personally, it doesn’t … Well, it doesn’t affect me at all because I’m not at all … I’ve never been the type who supports politics and … ehm, so it doesn’t affect me at all … It’s up to them, I guess, what they say. I mean, it’s not something that affects me, and these kinds of attitudes you actually shouldn’t take personally or take to heart because as long as you know that you’re not what they say, then there is no reason to, yah … Talk about it or … That’s what I think.
* Isra, female, 22, born in Denmark, parents from Somalia.
Along with other interviewees, Isra was of the opinion that it is best to “shut your ears” and “not care about” politicians. This shows that political disinterestedness, instead of expressing political apathy or loss of political agency, can be more actively chosen. The somewhat odd expression of not being “the type who supports politics” underlines this. By caring about politics, you feed it with your energy and attention. Not supporting it means deciding that politicians are not important to listen to. Isra’s attempt to deconstruct her and other minority youths’ membership in the immigrant target group is a way of refusing to be hurt by politicians’ words. The distancing from politics that is expressed as political disinterestedness is a tool that protects minority youths from being victims and lets them see themselves through a lens other than politicians’ negative constructions (because they are just that: constructions, cf. the earlier discussion). As such, it gives them a measure of control. That this distancing has detrimental effects on one way of gaining power (voting) may in some minority interviewees’ everyday lives be less important than avoiding the emotional cost of engaging in politics and thus necessarily with political messages about their unbelonging and unwantedness. This “rising above” can indeed feel empowering. This suggests that it is not that minority youths are less “willing to take on the cost of voting” (Fraga Reference Fraga2018, 70), but that the cost of investing in politics, of taking its messages seriously, is higher for them than for majority youths.
To appreciate this point, compare this distancing to how political disinterestedness was expressed by majority interviewees. Only one majority interviewee talked about Danish politics as “boring” or “irrelevant.” Disinterested majority interviewees instead expressed a more apathetic, “I just don’t care that much about understanding it” and “I don’t follow it, really” attitude. For them, being disinterested was associated with not following news about societal and political issues, and with low levels of political knowledge; that is, the bundle of orientations that are usually seen as connected (Zaller Reference Zaller1992; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady Reference Verba, Schlozman and Brady1995). In addition, they expressed feeling that “politics is remote from my everyday life”; that is, not something they could see the personal relevance in. This strengthens my interpretation of the coping effects of political disinterestedness for minority youths: It is not that they do not follow politics, but that they need to create distance from it. It is not that they think politics is irrelevant for their everyday lives, but that they need it to affect their lives less. For majority youths, lack of political interest is more straightforwardly a matter of being “cognitively disengaged” (as also demonstrated by Wattenberg Reference Wattenberg2012, 55-83), suggesting that minority and majority youths express different types of phenomena when they declare themselves disinterested. This has implications for the measurement validity of survey-based research of differently targeted groups’ political interest.
Minority youths’ distancing/dissociating from politics was also expressed more implicitly in the form of widespread use of irony and joking when talking about the political targeting of immigrants. Laughter and irony were almost absent in conversations about politics with majority youths, revealing in more subtle terms the ways that differently targeted groups try to deal with politics. Laughing and joking often expressed a sense of disbelief. For instance, Khadija joked about the Danish People’s Party “banning—I don’t know—chocolate, because it’s dark.” In a conversation about the then Minister of Integration’s recent proposal to revoke some immigrants’ Danish citizenship, she stated that “Inger Støjberg says some pretty funny things, sometimes, like outrageous stuff … It’s just fun sometimes that they [politicians] actually think of saying stuff like that.” Her choice of words (“it’s just fun”, “outrageous stuff”) may appear misplaced considering the seriousness of the topic, but what she and other minority interviewees did by laughing and being ironic about politicians was to hold up a mirror: They exposed the misplacedness of politicians’ words and actions.
The fact that several interviewees who did not know each other made similar jokes suggests that joking is part of a shared vocabulary employed to handle their position as negative political targets. On the one hand, these jokes expressed criticism in a way that allowed minority youths to be political, even if they thought (or needed to think) of themselves as disinterested. On the other hand, by joking, minority interviewees seemed to relieve themselves from thinking too deeply about the potential consequences of some of these political decisions. This tension between quiescence and criticism shows that political engagement and political agency are not simple either/or matters. At one and the same time, dissociation in the form of expressing lack of political interest or making fun and joking can function as a coping mechanism and as a power move.
It is important to remember that more than half of minority interviewees did vote and participate in other political activities. While this study shows political interest to be associated with political participation, some of the interviewees who voted declared themselves disinterested in politics, testifying to the spread of this sentiment in the group. The number of interviewees in this category (disinterested and active) is limited but it appears that a common factor in motivating their political participation was being in direct contact with targeted policies (e.g., housing demolitions) and experiencing a “need to act” (Oskooii Reference Oskooii2018). This tentative finding bridges between the policy-feedback perspective and the political discrimination perspective, suggesting a specification of the mechanism that leads some negatively targeted individuals to refrain from voting while mobilizing others. When political discrimination appears in the tangible form of resource deprivation or there is a concrete decision or policy that people can act against, it has a mobilizing potential (Pérez Reference Pérez2015; Pantoja, Ramirez, and Segura Reference Pantoja, Ramirez and Segura2001). In contrast, when politics attacks one’s worth and status and the material costs are intangible, the demobilizing tendency appears to be stronger. This distinction has implications for how future studies should conceptualize and measure political discrimination and which effects we would expect from it (see also Oskooii Reference Oskooii2016, Reference Oskooii2018 for efforts to disentangle countering effects of different forms of discrimination).
Discussion
The analysis of Danish minority and majority youths’ conceptions of and relationships to politics has implications for the political-participation and the policy-feedback literatures. First, while the study confirms decades of research in political participation concerning the importance of political interest, it also challenges the conceptualization of it as an individual trait. Being a negative political target can be such an omnipresent experience that the only viable solution is to keep politics at arm’s length. This may explain why traditional socioeconomic background factors are not strong predictors of voting behavior among minority youths (but are so for majority youths). Higher levels of education do not remove the experience of being a negative political target (to the point, several interviewees stated that “no matter how well you do, how much you integrate, it’s still not good enough”), and therefore education’s “usual” effects on voter turnout through political interest fail to appear. What is more, political (dis)interest means different things to members of different target groups. It is a luxury of the invisibly targeted majority youths to simply “not care” about politics because they do not “see” politics in their everyday lives. In contrast, the negatively targeted minority youths must make a concerted effort to keep politics at a distance, and this effort is expressed as political disinterestedness. This insight warns us against automatically interpreting seeming political disinterestedness as the absence of civic identity or as apathy. Minority youths do not lack cognitive engagement or knowledge about politics, they are as committed or even more committed than majority youths to democratic values and to the duty to vote, and they engage in and have opinions about society. Their lower levels of political interest point first and foremost to characteristics of the political environment, not to individual dispositions.
Second, this study contributes to nuancing our knowledge about how politics may feed back. Specifically, citizens learn about their target group membership not only through direct encounters with policies but more generally through policy signals and political messages. While this point may be implicit in some policy-feedback scholars’ theorizing (e.g., Pierson Reference Pierson1993), this study is unique in demonstrating how minority youths perceive the political targeting as embedded in the general political, even societal, discourse. This connects to Oskooii’s (Reference Oskooii2018) work on political versus societal discrimination. Oskooii suggests distinguishing between the two because the former is mobilizing while the latter is demobilizing. My study demonstrates the interconnectedness of the two phenomena: Through affecting the “social pecking order” (Lamont Reference Lamont2018, 434), negative political targeting can diffuse into societal discrimination, suggesting that the latter mediates the former and challenging the idea that the two phenomena can be studied in isolation. By studying the subjective experiences and causal narratives of interviewees, this study sheds light on how the worth of different groups of citizens can be constructed politically in a way that either makes people take it for granted (majority youths) or spreads into a broad sense of devaluation (minority youths).
Third, while the policy-feedback literature focuses on a damaged sense of political agency as the mechanism leading the negatively targeted to become quiescent, and while this does seem to be the case for some interviewees (like Antonio), the analysis paints a picture not only of minority youths’ powerlessness but also their agency. By turning their backs on politics and “shutting” their ears, interviewees refuse to be victims of politicians’ messages. Bassel and Emejulu (Reference Bassel and Emejulu2017) have made a similar point in their analysis of minority women in France and Britain who are often portrayed as silent, passive, and apolitical but whose ability to survive and maintain strong self-images even under severe material and political circumstances should, according to the authors, be considered a form of resistance—a “politics of survival.”
This opens up a discussion about what counts as political and political behavior (Bassel and Emejulu Reference Bassel and Emejulu2017, 9) and exposes a tension in the identities of the self-declared politically disinterested minority youths because they at one and the same time seek to depoliticize and critique established politics. Their use of irony in conversations about politics mirrors Wedeen’s findings about the role of comedy and joking in repressive regimes (specifically President Hafiz al-Asad’s Syria). While citizens’ use of humor in conversations about politics may be seen as a depoliticizing “safety valve,” the allowance of which secures the quiescence of the oppressed, it is also “where … political vitality resides and where critique and oppositional consciousness thrive” (Reference Wedeen1999, 89). Obviously, this does not lead minority youths—or Syrian citizens under the elder al-Asad—to collectively mobilize and stand up against what they perceive as unfair policies, but it does open up a venue for cultivating political identities and recognizing their “shared circumstances of unbelief” (ibid., 90). Instead of leading to atomization, as predicted in the policy-feedback literature (Schneider and Ingram Reference Schneider and Ingram1993), minority youths overcome the isolation and stigma of their target group construction and find a way of being critical citizens together, even if this does not take all of them to the voting booth. This tension between quiescence and critique is lost if we rely on traditional perspectives on political participation and interpret abstention on election day (only) as an expression of political apathy and lack of political agency.
Conclusion
Going behind the puzzle that the minority/majority turnout gap constitutes for existing theories of political participation, this study sheds light on the symbolic power of policies and political discourse in shaping individuals’ ideas about politics and their status as citizens. Using the theoretical leverage of the Danish case, I show that institutions, rights, and resources are not sufficient for securing equal political participation for differently targeted groups. The negative targeting of “non-Western immigrants and descendants” and the positive—but often hidden—targeting of majority youths results in substantial differences in their relationship to politics. For majority youths, politics is a rather abstract phenomenon that makes society function, and most of them do not experience politics as affecting their everyday lives directly. For minority youths, the topic of immigrants and immigration is integral to politics to the point where the two cannot be separated, making politics ever-present, personal, and burdensome.
The varied sample of minority interviewees with different ethno-cultural backgrounds further underlines that it is the experience of being constructed as an unwanted minority group that is central. Of course, parents are not unimportant as political role models and for cultivating civic identities in their children. However, one-fifth of the minority interviewees whose parents vote in Danish elections did not vote themselves, and almost half of the minority interviewees whose parents do not vote in Danish elections always or sometimes vote themselves. In addition, there is substantial variation across interviewees in whether they reported talking to their parents about societal and political issues, but most of them shared the impression of being negatively targeted in Danish politics. In other words, while political socialization in the home is important, it is not enough, and if one does not come from a home with many political resources, a hostile political climate is likely to be even more difficult to handle.
I do not claim that these findings can be translated directly to other contexts and minority groups. Indeed, a central point of the study is to be sensitive to the subjective experiences that condition different groups’ relationship to politics in different contexts. That said, I believe the Danish case, with its combination of formal institutional openness and increased social mobility with a hostile political climate, suggests potentially very severe consequences of the mainstreaming of anti-immigrant political messages that we are witnessing in other European countries (Simonsen Reference Simonsen2019) and, increasingly, in the United States. In some of these places, political representation of minority views will most likely serve to buffer some of the negative effect, providing an outlet for political grievances. However, Danish minority youths’ abstention cannot be ascribed to a lack of political outlets. Granted, the political right and center in Denmark can be characterized as anti-immigrant, but the political left promotes pro-immigrant views and with quite some success (vote shares for these parties increased substantially in the most recent election). Minority interviewees were not completely blind to this, but the political attacks on their worth weighed more heavily on them and their conceptions of politics. Thus, because of the subjective salience of anti-immigrant messages, counter messaging was much less effective in reaching and convincing minority (and, for that matter, majority) interviewees.
This demonstrates the power of negative political targeting and suggests that substantial efforts are needed to persuade minority youths that they are valued and wanted. Similar arguments were recently advanced in relation to Latino voter participation in the United States, which reached an all-time low in 2016, disappointing the prediction that Latinos would secure Hillary Clinton’s victory. Going against “conventional wisdom [i.e., theories of political discrimination] that after a year of rhetorical attacks by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump against Latinos and immigrants […] Latinos would respond with record turnout,” the election instead proved that “political participation is a two-way street. The current political system alienates Latinos; we need to stop portraying them as apathetic and blaming them for not showing up to vote, but rather find ways to diminish their sense of alienation and facilitate their participation” (Lopez-Bunyasi and Nuño-Pérez Reference Lopez-Bunyasi and Nuño-Pérez2020).
This suggests the potential in analyzing other cases through the lens of political feedback, with particular attention to subjective conceptions of politics. The fact that voter turnout for minority youths of the same ethnicity varies substantially across European countries and cities (Herzog-Punzenberger et al. Reference Herzog-Punzenberger, Fibbi, Very-Larrucea, DeSipio, Mollenkopf, Crul and Mollenkopf2012) challenges explanations that blame “minority culture” and further suggests that the political context is important and deserves attention in future research.
Supplementary Materials
Appendix 1. Definitions of Minority and Majority and Overview of Interviewee Characteristics
Appendix 2. Interview guide (translated from Danish to English)
Appendix 3. Overview of Political Participation.
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1537592720002431.
