Legislating Islamophobia: Fringe Organizations, Sharia Bills, & Democratization

• In Event: Poster Session: Religion and Politics

Abstract

Anti-Sharia Bills have been introduced in more than half of the American states and these bills turned into laws in several. A well-connected network of organizations promoting the fear of Muslims through discourses of security and Jihad has been instrumental in the passage of these anti-Sharia bills. In this paper, I answer two related questions: (1) what explains the success of exclusionary legislation such as anti-Sharia bills in a number of American states? (2) What are the implications of this legislation for increasing religious prejudice? I argue that the success of anti-Sharia legislation can be explained by the (i) uneven socioeconomic development across states, (ii) historical roots of religious prejudice, and (iii) increased activities of fringe organizations in the mainstream civil space. Utilizing a unique dataset including the timing, frequency, and success of exclusionary legislation, the distribution of extremist and fringe organizations promoting fears of Islam, and state and district level socio-economic indicators, I run statistical models to account for the success and failure of anti-Sharia bills in the American states. The initial results show that historically rooted patterns of prejudice, the intensity of lobbying carried by anti-Muslim networks, and the density of extremist organizations predict the success of anti-Sharia bills. These results imply that as exclusion of out-groups becomes a mainstream discourse, the pluralistic roots of American sub-national democratization are undermined. The new genre of fringe organizations utilizes the opportunity structures in political space to legitimize the anti-Muslim attitudes in the American context. Their success in legalizing exclusionary practices depends on extensive lobbying, their ties to “far-right” national elite, and most importantly to a historically-rooted political culture of exclusion at the sub-national level. The analysis of the original data shows that, fringe organizations activate the dark side of the social capital to promote prejudice and discrimination against minority groups. This in turn undermines the democratic effect of civic culture and cast substantial doubt into the “social capital-democracy nexus” in the context of the rising anti-Muslim sentiment in the US. This study has important implications about the lasting impact of historical institutions on American political culture (Key 1949; O’Connell 2012; Acharya Balckwell and Sen 2016), the dynamics of American sub-national democratization (Mickey 2014), and the burgeoning literature on anti-Muslim sentiments in the US(Bleich 2014; Creighton and Jamal 2015).

References:

Acharya, Avidit, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen. 2016. “The Political Legacy of American Slavery.” Journal of Politics 78 (3): 621-641.
Bleich, E., 2011. What is Islamophobia and how much is there? Theorizing and measuring an emerging comparative concept. American Behavioral Scientist, 55(12), pp.1581-1600.
Creighton, M.J. and Jamal, A., 2015. Does Islam play a role in anti-immigrant sentiment? An experimental approach. Social science research, 53, pp.89-103.
Heather A. O’Connell. 2012. “The Impact of Slavery on Racial Inequality in Poverty in the Contemporary US South.” Social Forces 90: 713-734.
Key, V. O. 1956. American state politics: An introduction. New York: Knopf.
Mickey, R., 2015. Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944-1972. Princeton University Press.

Author

• Sabri Ciftci, Kansas State University