The ‘Muslim Vote’ in 2010. Misrecognition and Political Agency

In the run-up to the British general election of 2010 there were various attempts to both mobilize and harness Muslim voters, and the ‘Muslim vote’ was courted to different degrees by all of the mainstream parties in England, Scotland and Wales. Internet-based campaigns were launched and community organisations sought to galvanise different strands of Muslim civil society. While, for example, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) was concerned to ‘normalize’ the electoral participation of Muslims, it equally tried to emphasize the weight and significance of a ‘Muslim Vote’. Other groups took an avowedly partisan stance, such as the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPACUK), which envisaged taking ‘a sledgehammer to the slave-like blind loyalty our community has given to the Labour party’.

In this paper we explore the advocacy work of organisations involved in such mobilizations. Drawing on field research and qualitative interviews, the paper illuminates how organisations understood their objectives and positions. It suggests that the concept of misrecognition allows us to register how religious minority identities provide categories of claims-making that are difficult to articulate in British political debate. The article considers disputes about Muslim representation, conceptions of ‘the Muslim Vote’ and contestations about neutrality in politically partisan elections. By empirically working through these features, we are able to illustrate five ways in which Muslim actors see their political agency to be misrecognized and how organisations respond to different types of misrecognition.