UC Riverside

Are Muslims incorporated into American politics? The use of both interviews and statistical analyses, I seek to provide an understanding of where Muslim Americans are in the process of political incorporation. By looking at several areas of political incorporation, I establish that Muslim Americans are in the early stages of political incorporation. I begin by providing the American political development of Muslim Americans. This then sets the stage of a series of statistical analyses, where I look at vote choice in two presidential elections, civic and political participation and the relationships between issue preferences, ideology and partisanship. In addition, through the importance of certain predictors, including religiosity, race and ethnicity and discrimination, I show that Muslim Americans may have presence in the politics, but lack any real weight. Muslim Americans may have gained some social, political and economic power but they are unable to shed their stigmatization and emerge from the margins.