Praying on Friday, voting on Sunday? Mosque attendance and voter turnout in three West European democracies

Several studies have demonstrated a positive association between regular church attendance and turning out to vote in established democracies. This paper examines whether the relationship holds for Muslims who regularly attend religious services. Using an original dataset of Muslim-origin citizens in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, I find that regular mosque attendance is indeed associated with higher likelihood to vote in national elections in Germany and the United Kingdom, while among Dutch Muslims turnout is positively associated with individual religiosity. I find evidence that the proposed association between regular mosque attendance and voting is mediated through the acquisition of relevant political information and stronger associational involvement. The paper provides an individual-level analysis complementing studies of country-level institutional particularities and group-level characteristics that are conducive to higher levels of turnout among Muslims. The findings dispel the myth that mosques are sites of civic alienation and self-segregation, but can, in fact, play the role of ‘schools of democracy

Fighting for their neighborhood: Urban policy and anti-state riots in France

Why does anti-state, violent rioting take place in advanced democracies? The paper investigates the role of the urban environment in shaping grievances expressed and mobilization/counter-mobilization processes observed during a riotous episode. In particular, I look at large social-housing estates as a propitious urban setting for the eruption and sustenance of anti-state violence. I identify three mechanisms (stigma amplification and inversion, failure of state intervention in the form of everyday administration and emergency policing, and advantages for network activation and resource mobilization among potential rioters) that complement standard explanations of rioting based on socioeconomic and ethno-cultural grievances. I test the theoretical model using a controlled case study of two neighboring suburbs in the North of Paris, with similar socioeconomic, demographic, and political characteristics but different violent outcomes in the 2005 nation-wide wave of French riots. The paper traces the source of local variation to the exogenous presence of large, concentrated social-housing estates in one, but not the other. The analysis here treats anti-state rioting as a form of urban protest and looks at state-society divisions rooted in urban geography and policy that have been overlooked in conventional scholarship on minority mobilization in Europe

Puzzled out? The unsurprising outcomes of the Greek bailout negotiations

While to date the Eurozone debt crisis is one of the most important and consequential events in world politics of the twenty-first century, the actions taken by states to negotiate a cooperative resolution do not seem particularly puzzling. In this article, we employ the analytic explanation approach to process tracing to test whether the most protracted and high-profile case – negotiations between creditors led by Germany, and Greece as debtor state – indeed validate three central hypotheses of basic cooperation theory regarding the sources of bargaining strength. We conclude that while bargaining leverage did emerge primarily from the ability to withstand non-agreement, the weaker Greece was able to achieve marginal concessions reflecting terms that departed from Germany’s initial win-set. This leverage stemmed however not from a threat based on domestic political constraints, but from the realization that Greece’s structural economic weakness rendered the strictest austerity measures untenable. The policy implication is that the credibility of the weaker side’s negotiating signal arose not from domestic politics, but the impartial assessments of international technocrats and private rating agencies

“Vielfalt and diversité: how local actors in France and Germany evaluate immigration and socio-cultural heterogeneity”

In both Germany and France, perceptions of immigration, diversity and their societal consequences have undergone important transformations in the past two decades. However, existing research has o

Propagating semantic information in biochemical network models

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>To enable automatic searches, alignments, and model combination, the elements of systems biology models need to be compared and matched across models. Elements can be identified by machine-readable biological annotations, but assigning such annotations and matching non-annotated elements is tedious work and calls for automation.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A new method called "semantic propagation" allows the comparison of model elements based not only on their own annotations, but also on annotations of surrounding elements in the network. One may either propagate feature vectors, describing the annotations of individual elements, or quantitative similarities between elements from different models. Based on semantic propagation, we align partially annotated models and find annotations for non-annotated model elements.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Semantic propagation and model alignment are included in the open-source library semanticSBML, available on sourceforge. Online services for model alignment and for annotation prediction can be used at <url>http://www.semanticsbml.org</url>.</p

A transformation of social democracy? : the case of the French plural left in the 1997 legislative elections

Existing theories of social democracy make certain predictions with regards to preferences of the electorate and the characteristics of party types. In this dissertation I test and expand these predictions through the case of the French Socialist Party prior to the 1997 elections. The importance of party strategy and organisation in capturing new, "post-materialist" voters is particularly stressed. Two smaller case studies, the British New Labour and the Spanish Socialist Party during the same period, are used to refine the proposed model

Estates against the state? Evidence from the 2005 wave of French riots

Violent anti-state rioting has erupted in many neighborhoods in Western Europe over the last thirty years. Conventional explanations emphasize socioeconomic or ethno-racial grievances, the under-representation of immigrant minorities, or the effects of national integration models on state-minority relations. Much less attention has been paid to the particular characteristics of the neighborhoods in which anti-state rioting takes place. I argue that living in neighborhoods with large social-housing estates fuels grievances over territorial stigmatization, poor administration and heavy-handed policing. In addition, rioters hailing from such urban areas enjoy tactical advantages and employ territorially anchored networks and identities. Using an original municipal-level dataset from the 2005 wave of anti-state riots in France and controlling for competing explanations the paper provides evidence that the propensity and intensity of anti-state rioting are associated with the presence of large social-housing estates. Further supporting evidence for the hypothesized mechanisms is subsequently provided from the 2005 and previous rioting episodes in France

Group consciousness and political behavior among citizens of immigrant origin: The case of France

This paper explores various characteristics of political behavior of persons of immigrant origin in France (abstention and registration rates, degree of interest in politics and right-left self placement). Using newly available survey data that bypass data availability issues in that country, I conduct tests pertaining to the importance of ethnic voting and ethnic consciousness in political behavior. In particular, several potentially salient identities are selected for testing (Arab, Black, Muslim) and contrasted with the hypothesis of convergence between immigrant descendants and the rest of the French population. I find little evidence for an independent effect of potentially salient ethnic identities on political behavior, with the exception of being black from overseas territories