Muslim Minority Representation in European Legislatures: The Significance of Multiethnically Institutionalized Polities

In this article, I make three principal contributions to the study of Muslim minorities’ representation in European legislatures. First, I present a new crossnational dataset of 408 Muslim parliamentarians who served in the national legislatures of 20 European polities in 2010 and 2014, Muslim Representation Index (MRI), which reveals remarkable crossnational variation in the legislative representation of Muslim minorities in relation to their share of the general population. MRI is the dependent variable of my study. Second, I conceptualize, operationalize and measure Multiethnically Institutionalized Polity (MEIP) as a potential explanatory variable, which is more congruent with the observed pattern of Muslim minorities' legislative representation than most other independent variables found in the extant literature. Third, I operationalize and measure eight other potential explanatory variables found int he extant scholarly literature on minority representation and compare them against the empirical regularities found in the MRI dataset. In conclusion, only three of the nine hypotheses examined are found to be congruent with the observed patterns of Muslim minority representation in European legislatures. All the MEIPs are observed to have proportionate and even over- representation of their Muslim minorities in their national legislatures. Autochthonous status of the Muslim minority is observed to be congruent with higher legislative representation only among the non-MEIPs, whereas in polities where Muslims are of immigrant origin (about half of the MRI dataset), higher naturalization rates are observed to be congruent with higher Muslim representation.