Elisabeth Ivarsflaten and Paul M. Sniderman’s The Struggle for Inclusion not only makes a seminal contribution to our understanding of public support for the integration of Muslims in Western societies, it is also a model of careful and thoughtful marshalling of evidence, intellectual humility, and innovative thinking about research design. The main focus of the book is on understanding the terms upon which non-Muslims are open to including Muslims in their societies. The book shows that latent majority support for inclusion exists within multiple Western countries, but also that this may be contingent on how the terms for inclusion are specified. In the process of developing the empirical argument, the book also makes significant theoretical and methodological contributions.

As the authors show in chapter 2, motivating the central research question is that outright demonization of Muslims is a minority phenomenon. Instead, survey experiments in five European countries demonstrate that respondents are inclined to differentiate between types of Muslims. For instance, they show that a majority in each country is apt to approve rental of a local community house to “a Muslim congregation,” but to oppose renting to “a Muslim fundamentalist group,” just as they would not rent to a neo-Nazi group. Highlighting the tendency to differentiate within groups opens up the terrain for identifying the terms on which publics accept or reject Muslim inclusion.

Chapter 3 offers a theoretical elaboration of the notion of inclusion. Ivarsflaten and Sniderman unpack it into two different types of respect for minority members: appraisal respect and recognition respect. Applied to Muslim minorities, the former suggests that respect requires “a judgment that Muslim culture … deserves to be held in high regard;” the latter, instead, requires that people “recognize the dignity of Muslims and take seriously [their] contributions” (p. 37). This distinction was initially introduced by Darwall in 1977 (“Two Kinds of Respect”, Ethics, 88[1]: 36-49), but scholars have been slow to recognize its significance for the study of inclusion. (Important exceptions include Galeotti’s Toleration as Recognition, 2002, and Balint’s Respecting Toleration, 2017, both of which are more theoretical than empirical in nature.) In the present book, the distinction is particularly important, as it helps readers evaluate the foundations on which support for inclusion rests in liberal democracies.

Chapters 4 through 7 investigate public support for a range of different examples of inclusion with varying implications for the type of respect implied. Chapter 4 shows that majorities of respondents defend publishers’ rights to communicate material offensive to Muslims, as long as it is not inaccurate or unreasonable, but also that only small minorities feel such material should be published. Chapter 5 finds that comfortable majorities support an increasing emphasis on diversity in textbooks, but only about half support considerable revisions to textbooks. Chapter 6 asks about asylum seekers who have held jobs and become active participants in society, finding that such behavior increases support for their permanent integration. Finally, chapter 7 shows that respondents support public dissemination of Muslim ideas in general, but not the preaching of conservative ideas about the position of women in Islam, and that people are also much more distrustful of Muslim (religious) leaders who express a commitment to integration than they are of Muslims not in positions of authority who do the same.

It is impossible to do full justice here to the breadth and nuance of the survey results presented in the book. The data brought to bear on these questions are uncommonly rich, drawing on thirty-four experiments embedded in twenty-four large-scale surveys in eight different countries in Northwest Europe and the United States, conducted from 2013–2020. The authors develop a “sequential factorials” approach, an important methodological innovation, in which successive experiments are informed by the findings (or non-findings) of previous rounds, making it possible to hone in on more precise formulations of a question, or to test whether a particular finding is context dependent. Thanks in particular to the Norwegian Citizen Panel, the authors were able to conduct an unusually long sequence of carefully tailored surveys, each building on the preceding ones, and the results illustrate the value both of the sequential factorials approach in general and of having such a repeated panel to draw on.

Taken together, the survey data presented in chapters 4–7 sketch a fluid situation, in which inclusion is possible, but contingent upon “the substance of inclusionary options and the normative principles … that underpin them” (p. 137). Different options may evoke competing normative considerations, and some options may produce a “polarization trap”—a situation where majorities favor inclusion but they are misunderstood as favoring exclusion because their support is conditional on the precise terms proposed by political actors (p. 10). This trap may thus generate an “overestimation of illiberal forces” (p. 131).

The book concludes by suggesting avenues for further research, calling for a new approach to thinking about inclusion—one that recognizes the contingency of support for inclusion but also the necessity of respect for minorities. As the authors dryly note, “it has been our experience that a taken-for-granted recognition of one’s worth is of secondary importance primarily to those assured of it” (p. 144). A particularly appealing aspect of the book is the intellectual humility of the authors. They openly note missteps made over the course of the inquiry along with attempts to correct them and limitations of those attempts. In keeping with the ethos exemplified by the book, we would like to suggest three additional lines of inquiry that complement and extend those already noted by the authors.

First, combining the sequential factorials approach with conjoint analyses, whether as part of a sequence of surveys or separately, could provide significant synergies. Conjoint analyses excel at identifying the implications and interactions of specific components of a larger question. For example, a conjoint study might investigate further Ivarsflaten and Sniderman’s finding that citizens tend to distrust Muslim leaders, by varying whether they speak the local language, how long they have lived in the country, whether they participate in non-religious activities in their community, etc. Compared to sequential factorials, conjoint analyses make fewer demands of scholars, in terms of both funding and patience. On the other hand, they do not allow for sequentially sharpening a line of investigation, nor for learning from mistakes, as the sequential factorials approach does. There is therefore considerable appeal in creatively combining the strengths of the two approaches.

Second, while the book is framed as an inquiry into the inclusion challenges facing Muslims, some of the surveys pose questions in terms of immigrants, asylum seekers, or diversity in general. One survey specifically asks about “Muslim immigrants” (p. 159). The fact that response patterns across different specifications are consistent raises some intriguing questions. Is such consistency evidence that many people think of Muslims as immigrants and immigrants as Muslim? Would answers vary if respondents were prompted with a different group (e.g., Hindus, or Ukrainians)? And would it make a difference if Muslims were explicitly identified as citizens? Answering these questions is crucial to disentangling the relative contribution of religion and foreign origin, and to understanding whether the book’s findings apply only to inclusion of the “Muslim minorities” of the subtitle, or to minorities more broadly.

To make this point clearer, in our own book, we find that coverage of Muslims in U.S. newspapers is notably more negative than that of other religious or minority groups. Moreover, though this “Muslim penalty” shrinks when coverage focuses on Muslim Americans, it does not disappear. By analogy, we might expect that explicitly identifying Muslims as fellow citizens would reduce the size of Ivarsflaten and Sniderman’s findings, but not eliminate them. However, that is only a hypothesis; much remains to be learned about the effect on public attitudes of various combinations of citizenship, country of birth, religion, etc.

This brings us to a third topic for future research: the origins of public attitudes. To give one example, suspicion of Muslim clerics cannot have arisen from nowhere. As we note in Covering Muslims, a plurality of survey respondents in the United States get most of their information about Muslims from the media. Since the media play a consequential role across Western democracies, this suggests payoffs from building on the combined findings of The Struggle for Inclusion and Covering Muslims to answer questions such as: How do the quantity and source(s) of news consumption interact with respondent scores on the overall tolerance index? How does one’s main news source affect opinions about Muslims specifically? And is it possible to connect media coverage directly to survey results? To return to the earlier example, are Muslim clerics perhaps more frequently portrayed as at odds with mainstream society than are average Muslims?

Overall, The Struggle for Inclusion represents a major contribution to the study of diversity and inclusion in liberal democracies. It convincingly links survey findings to key theoretical questions about democratic norms and highlights the importance of respect as a foundation for inclusion. Its cautiously optimistic message about the openness of non-Muslims to including Muslims is refreshing. The findings open a rich vein of ideas for further research, while also offering tangible strategies for political entrepreneurs to promote inclusion in their societies.