Does Discrimination Forge Politically Engaged Immigrant Citizens? A Study on the Paradoxical Relationship Between Discrimination and Protests in the EU

As the portion of the foreign-born population continues to grow across the European Union, gaps in overall political participation between immigrants and natives persist. This is a cause for concern to European democracies, specifically regarding their representativeness of the entirety of the population that constitutes them and that they are meant to serve. While scholars have focused on more conventional forms of political participation, this research aims to specifically focus on protests as a non-conventional form of political participation while taking both experienced and perceived discrimination as the main motivators and major determinants of this type of political behavior. Using data from the Survey on Minorities and Discrimination in EU conducted by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights in 2016, this paper argues that both the experience and perception of discrimination are positively related to participation in protest behaviors amongst citizens of immigrant...Show moreAs the portion of the foreign-born population continues to grow across the European Union, gaps in overall political participation between immigrants and natives persist. This is a cause for concern to European democracies, specifically regarding their representativeness of the entirety of the population that constitutes them and that they are meant to serve. While scholars have focused on more conventional forms of political participation, this research aims to specifically focus on protests as a non-conventional form of political participation while taking both experienced and perceived discrimination as the main motivators and major determinants of this type of political behavior. Using data from the Survey on Minorities and Discrimination in EU conducted by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights in 2016, this paper argues that both the experience and perception of discrimination are positively related to participation in protest behaviors amongst citizens of immigrant origin. This paper uses a binary logistic regression with experienced and perceived discrimination as predictor variables, and participation in protest as the response variable, while controlling for six key factors: age, gender, income, generation of immigration, interest in politics, and education. Countries were also used as control variables to counter potential biases in the results from the clustering that often occurs with the use of survey data.Show less

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Does Discrimination Forge Politically Engaged Immigrant Citizens? A Study on the Paradoxical Relationship Between Discrimination and Protests in the EU