Political Engagement Amongst Ethnic Minority Young People

Making a Difference

T. O´Toole, R. Gale

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137313317
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique sociale

This book engages with debates on ethnic minority and Muslim young people showing, beyond apathy and violent political extremism, the diverse forms of political engagement in which young people engage.

1

Politically (In)different? Political Engagement amongst Ethnic Minority Young People

When the political engagement of ethnic minority young people has featured in public debates in the UK, it has typically been connected with concerns about disengagement, disaffection or extremism. For instance, in the anxious debates about youth political apathy in the UK in recent years (Hay 2007), connected to the low levels of electoral participation among 18–24 year olds in elections since 2001 (Marsh et al. 2007), it is suggested that ethnic minority young people are even less likely to turn out to vote compared to young people in general or older ethnic minority groups (Purdam et al. 2002; Electoral Commission 2005), and that ethnic minority young people are less civically engaged (Janmaat 2008).

Such concerns about ethnic minority young people’s political engagement sit within wider histories of crisis narratives on ethnic minority young people in the UK (Bhattacharyya and Gabriel 2004; Gunter 2010). In the 1970s, Hall et al. (1978) highlighted highly racialised media discourses on black youth and law and order centred on the ‘moral panic’ around ‘mugging’, which was constructed essentially as a black crime and, particularly, as a pathology of black youth. Such tendencies were analysed in Solomos’ (1988) study of state interventions in the lives of black youth in the 1980s, which he argued were fixated on crime, the putative failure of black youth to assimilate to the education system and labour market, and urban disorders that positioned black youth as the ‘enemy within’. Writing some years later, Back (2002) suggested that debates on ethnic minority youth have been preoccupied with the themes of ‘lawless masculinities’, yob culture, concerns about the ‘aftershock of immigration’ reflected in the view of young people as ‘caught between cultures’ in tension with their parents’ and mainstream British cultures (Anwar 1998), or the pathologies of the inner city (Back 2002: 439).

In more recent times, such narratives have increasingly converged on the issue of religious, and particularly Muslim, youth identities. As Alexander (2004) pointed out, there are strong parallels between the crisis narratives on black youth of the 1970s and 1980s (and see Gunter 2010) and contemporary debates on Muslim youth, expressed in familiar themes of generational conflicts, educational under-attainment (Gillborn and Mirza 2000), criminality and disaffection (Lewis 2007), although now overlaid with concerns about political extremism (Home Office 2005), and the failure of community leaders to exercise control over young Muslims or to integrate them into local communities and democratic structures (Cantle 2001). In particular, the disturbances of 2001 in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham and the bombings of 7th July 2005 in London served to intensify debate over the disengagement of young Muslims of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage from mainstream political and civic life (Casciani 2004). In the aftermath of the 2001 disturbances, governmental reports and media commentators suggested that particular groups of ethnic minority young people had become increasingly politically disaffected. Indeed, the Local Government Association’s response to the reports on the 2001 disturbances concurred that the ‘disengagement of young people from local democratic processes is clear to see...’ (2002: 23). Whilst the Cantle Report (2001) on the factors contributing to the northern disturbances focused largely on ethnicity rather than religion as a key division within the three areas where the disturbances took place (and in this respect was in line with the terms of reference of the Parekh Report the year before), following the 9/11 attacks in the US,¹ these events were read post hoc as a conflict between young Muslims and the police, and increasingly focused on Muslim, as opposed to ‘Asian’, communities’ ‘self-segregation’ (Phillips 2006). The motif of ‘failed integration’ of British Muslims that emerged in the post-2001 period intensified following the London bombings of 2005 (Bagguley and Hussain 2008), carried out as they were by young British Muslims – a fact that featured prominently in the ensuing debates on the failures of British multiculturalism and the consequences of political disaffection among young Muslims.

Shortly after the 7th July attacks, in August 2005, the Preventing Extremism Together Working Groups were set up by the Home Office to generate proposals ‘to help prevent extremism’ and ‘reduce disaffection and radicalisation within Muslim communities across Britain’ (Home Office 2005: 97). Their report suggested that ‘[p]articipation by young Muslims in civic and political activity is lower than the national average’ and attributed this to their lack of confidence in mainstream Muslim organisations and UK political and civic institutions and low levels of political efficacy (Home Office 2005: 14). Subsequently, young people’s participation in local democratic structures featured in the Labour Government’s ‘Community Cohesion’ and ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ (PVE) agendas, leading to the institution of various youth forums and consultations at national and local levels. For instance, in 2008, the government established the national Young Muslims Advisory Group to advise government ministers, whilst its PVE strategy, that was launched in 2007, targeted funding at local projects aimed at engaging with young Muslims in order to promote community cohesion and combat violent extremism.

Comparable concerns about ethic minority and Muslim young people have been voiced in other European contexts. In France, these were prompted by the urban disorders that occurred in the suburbs of Paris in 2005 (Dikeç 2004; Duprez 2006), in which the ethnic and religious identities of young people involved in the disorders were the focus of discussion by commentators. As Mandaville (2009: 493) pointed out, however, religious referents were remarkably absent in the discourse of the participants themselves. Whilst the specific connotations of citizenship and group-belonging varied in the national debates that ensued from these events, in both the UK and France, attention focused on the political disaffection and social exclusion of ethnic minority and Muslim young people as well as on the models of national identity and integration to be pursued in policy responses. As in the UK, the French state established consultative bodies to engage with its Muslim population, such as the Conseil Français du Culte Musulman (CFCM) in 2003 (Bowen 2007), despite its formal commitment to laïcité, which has given rise to measures outlawing the wearing of the Muslim veil and other religious symbols in public.

Elsewhere across Europe, themes of failed integration of ethnic minority or Muslim young people have also featured in analyses of urban conflicts. Andersson (2010) argued that narratives of blame that criminalised ethnic minorities and Muslims and positioned them as holding cultural values incommensurate with national (secular) cultures were evident in Denmark following disturbances in 2008 in Nørrebro, Copenhagen, as well as in Norway in analyses of the demonstrations in Oslo in 2009 against Israeli actions in Gaza.

These developments in the UK, France, Denmark, Norway and elsewhere, are indicative of a generalised discursive shift from earlier concerns with the politics of ‘race’ and ethnicity to the politics of religious, and specifically Muslim, identities. This increased focus on Muslim identities within the public sphere, we argue, needs to be explored in relation to its various guises: as an object of governmental action, as ‘a highly polarised and stigmatic’ identity (Mandaville 2009: 493) and as a mode of identity giving form and substance to patterns of political engagement (Brah 1996; Gale and O’Toole 2009; Modood 2009a, 2009b; Meer 2010). Nevertheless, it is also one of the contentions of this book that the presently high levels of interest in Muslim identities as a dimension of political engagement should not obscure the continued relevance of ‘race’ and ethnicity as tropes of political action. As such, this volume reports our efforts to investigate the highly varied facets of identity and group experience that shape (and are in some senses shaped by) political involvement.

Claire Alexander (2004: 536) reminds us that crisis narratives on ethnic minority and Muslim young people are not confined to government or media discourses but are also a recurring motif of academic discourses that have characterised ‘racialised youth identities’ as ‘failing identities’. Such discourses tend to pay rather little attention to young people’s own perspectives, whilst the preoccupation with political disengagement and disaffection overlooks the ways in which ethnic minority and Muslim young people do politically engage. Between the focus on political disengagement on the one hand, and violent political extremism on the other, we argue there is a need to engage with the range of modes of political engagement among ethnic minority and Muslim young people. This volume explores the, often creative, ways in which ethnic minority young people do engage in political action as well as the issues that animate their political engagement.

Exploring the political disengagement thesis

Given the extent of public and media attention paid to issues of political disaffection or disengagement among ethnic minority and Muslim young people, it is surprising how few studies have directly explored their political experiences and engagement. Thus, there are relatively few survey-based studies of political and electoral participation that disaggregate by both ethnicity and age. Similarly, although anxieties about young Muslims’ political disengagement or radicalisation have to some degree overtaken discourses on ethnic minority young people, there are few survey studies that disaggregate patterns of political engagement by age and religion. As such, then, there has been rather little by way of robust data on turnouts, voting preferences, forms of political engagement or interest among either ethnic minority or Muslim young people. There are a few exceptions, such as the recent Ethnic Minority British Election Study (EMBES) of electoral engagement among ethnic and religious minorities in the 2010 General Election,² which we discuss below.

As we noted above, it is often thought that ethnic minority young people are even less likely to vote than young people or ethnic minority groups generally. Given how low youth voter turnouts have been in the UK in recent times (in common with many other established liberal democracies), this suggests worryingly low levels of engagement with the electoral process and its outcomes among young ethnic minorities. The turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds in the most recent (2010) UK General Election was 44%, compared to an overall turnout of 65%. This was nevertheless a reasonably significant recovery from previous turnouts, with youth turnout in the 2001 General Election falling to a postwar low of 39% (compared to an overall turnout of 59%) and dropping even further to 37% in the 2005 General Election (compared to 61% overall). A report by the Electoral Commission (2002: 50) suggested that these trends were even more pronounced among certain groups of ethnic minority youth, whilst a later MORI (2005: 8) report on ethnic minority participation in the 2005 UK General Election suggested that the ‘disconnection or alienation of youth, if this is the reason for low turnout, appears to have spread further among BMEs [sic] than among White People’. This view is challenged by early findings from the more recent EMBES analysis of electoral engagement among ethnic minorities in the 2010 General Election, which found that whilst age is a statistically significant factor determining turnout across all ethnic groups, the effect of age is actually weaker among ethnic minorities than it is for ‘White British’ (Heath et al. 2011: 262).

Studies of patterns of electoral participation among ethnic minorities, which rarely disaggregate by age and ethnicity, tend to suggest lower levels of both voter turnout and voter registration among ethnic minorities (Purdam et al. 2002; MORI 2005; Cutts et al. 2007). At the General Election in 2001, the UK Electoral Commission (2003) estimated that the turnout among all black and minority ethnic voters was only 47% compared to a turnout of 59% overall, and this figure was replicated in the 2005 General Election, remaining at 47% while overall turnout increased slightly to 61% (Electoral Commission 2005). Data on ethnic minority turnouts in the 2010 General Election collected by the EMBES team suggest very little difference in claimed turnouts between the ‘White British’, who had a claimed turnout of 78%, and all ethnic minority groups, whose claimed turnout was 77% (both figures for claimed turnouts are higher than the actual turnout in 2010 of 65% – which is consistent with findings across election studies of higher levels of claimed compared to actual turnouts).

Echoing analyses of ethnicity in other domains, such as education and employment, however, there is considerable variation across ethnic minority groups in levels of electoral engagement, with turnout among ‘Asian’ voters typically as high as, or higher than, average turnouts, whilst turnouts among ‘black African’, ‘black Caribbean’ and ‘mixed’ groups tend to be lower (Purdam et al. 2002; Cutts et al. 2007). In the 1997 General Election, a booster sample survey of black and minority ethnic voters, conducted alongside the main British Election Study (BES), suggested a higher self-reported turnout rate among ‘Indian’ (82%) than ‘white’ (79%) voters, with much lower turnout rates among ‘black African’ (64%) and ‘black Caribbean’ (68%) voters (cited Purdam et al. 2002: 13). Cutts et al.’s (2007) analysis of South Asian voters, using the ‘Nam Pehchan’ system of name recognition of marked electoral registers to identify participation in the 2001 General Election, found that turnout was as high as, or slightly higher than, the overall rate, with particularly high turnouts among Hindus. In the 2005 General Election again, MORI data found that claimed turnout was higher among ‘Asian’ groups than among ‘black’ groups – with claimed turnouts of 67% among ‘Indian’, 70% among ‘Pakistani’ and 76% among ‘Bangladeshi’ groups, compared to 61% among ‘African’, 54% among ‘Caribbean’ and just 40% among ‘mixed race’ groups (MORI 2005: 10). Heath et al. (2011) suggest that analyses based on claimed turnouts can be misleading – even when accounting for the gap typically found between claimed and actual turnouts – since over-claiming of turnouts can vary across ethnic groups. Their own data on turnouts for the 2010 General Election suggested that once claimed turnouts had been validated (by checking against the electoral registers for ballots that had actually been issued), a pattern of higher levels of over-claiming turnout among Asian groups could be discerned, with rather little over-claiming among black groups – perhaps then reducing somewhat the differences between these groups in relation to turnouts. Nevertheless, their own data also reveal a pattern of higher validated turnout rates among ‘Indian’, ‘Pakistani’ and ‘Bangladeshi’ groups – all of whom had a validated turnout of 78%, compared to ‘Black Caribbean’ and ‘Black African’ groups, who had slightly lower validated turnout rates of 75% and 73% respectively (2011: 261). Whether Heath et al.’s figures indicate a trend towards a closing of the gap between ethnic minority turnout rates, or a methodological refinement, it is likely that those analyses of voting patterns that rely on an undifferentiated catch-all category of ‘ethnic minority’, ‘black and minority ethnic (BME)’ or ‘non-white’ elide more than they reveal.

Whether they are based on claimed, or validated, turnout data, it is often thought that the figures on ethnic minority electoral participation underestimate total turnouts, given lower levels of electoral registration among some ethnic minority groups (Anwar 2001; Heath et al. 2011). A MORI poll of 2001, for instance, indicated that around 27% of ethnic minority non-voters were not registered to vote compared to 15% of non-voters overall. It suggested rates of non-registration probably varied across ethnic groups and were likely to be particularly high among black groups (Purdam et al. 2002). The EMBES team has also collected data on registration rates, and their preliminary findings also suggest some significant variations between ethnic groups, with ‘Black African’ groups in particular self-reporting significantly lower levels of electoral registration (Fisher et al. 2011).

Given the variation across minority ethnic groups in relation to turnouts and registration, it seems probable then that there are some significant differences across groups of ethnic minority younger people – although since studies infrequently disaggregate by age and ethnicity, we have little by way of robust data to assess whether there are any clear patterns of (differentiated) disengagement. Similarly, despite the contentions of the Cantle (2001) and Preventing Extremism Together (PET) Working Groups (2005) reports concerning political disengagement among young Asians or young Muslims, we have relatively little data that confirm low levels of engagement with mainstream politics.

Survey data on ethnic minority young people’s political engagement that do exist suggest a complicated picture of engagement with formal mainstream politics. For example, whilst a 2005 MORI report on ethnic minority electoral engagement found lower turnouts among ethnic minority younger people as well as lower levels of interest in politics and levels of registration (echoing patterns among younger people generally), it reported higher levels of active involvement in election campaigns among 18- to 24-year-olds than among older groups (this related to activities other than reading election manifestos). The report attributed this interesting result either to young people’s susceptibility to peer group pressure to become involved or ‘to hindsight (young people following the news and prepared to take an interest but feeling in retrospect that the election was not interesting after all)’ (2005: 31–2). Beyond explanations based on conformity or the misplaced expectations of young people, this finding sits better perhaps with the contention made in many literatures on political participation that among the young there are new political subjectivities emerging that are characterised by a preference for forms of direct, hands-on political engagement rather than for voting or other forms of institutional affiliation or membership – a pattern that is reflected in our own data, as we discuss later in this book.

It should be noted that low levels of electoral engagement or party membership are not in themselves evidence of political disengagement: as several studies of youth political participation have asserted, voter abstention is not in itself an indicator of political apathy (Hay 2007; Marsh et al. 2007).³ Indeed, research on young people’s and ethnic minorities’ politics points to the significance of activism outside the terrain of electoral and party politics (Bousetta 2001; Marsh et al. 2007; Stolle et al. 2008). As Fahmy (2004: no page) notes:

[E]mphasis upon formal participation through the ballot b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Politically (In)different? Political Engagement amongst Ethnic Minority Young People
• 2 Changing Political Participation
• 3 Research Design and Methodology
• 4 Grammars of Political Action
• 5 Participatory Governance
• 6 ‘Race’, Culture and Representation: The Changing Contours of Identity Politics
• 7 Gendered Roles, Spaces and Political Activism
• 8 The Political Geography of Ethnicity and Religion in Young People’s Political Engagement
• 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index