Europe’s political parties have been making choices about whether and how to include people of Muslim faith or background in their lists of candidates for municipal elections. The decisions are not easy. Center-left parties open to diversity also have commitments to secularism and public programs with limited resources. Center-right parties standing for tradition also value religious faith and old-fashioned morality. Many non-Muslim voters dislike voting for Muslim candidates or even for parties that include Muslims on lists of candidates. If there are few Muslims in the local electorate, a party might not put forward any Muslim candidates. But in a highly diverse city with a cosmopolitan electorate, a promising candidate for city council could be a nonveiling woman of Muslim background. Many Muslims live in concentrated urban enclaves, and council elections can be based on small districts. A potential vote getter in such a district could be a senior male candidate with strong ties to a large extended family who could mobilize social resources and win a local seat.

How do parties navigate these choices? Why do parties differ in nominating Muslim candidates? Why do they sometimes select progressives and sometimes traditional patriarchs? How do Muslim candidacies affect the ideological coherence of their parties? When parties nominate Muslims, which other potential candidates lose ballot spots?

Rafaela M. Dancygier poses and answers these questions in Dilemmas of Inclusion: Muslims in European Politics. The key dilemma is that Muslim candidates can potentially attract votes from Muslim citizens, but they can also repel votes from non-Muslim natives who hold negative attitudes about Muslims. Simply put, parties cannot easily cultivate votes from a new group while also holding onto their core supporters. Given this problem, Dancygier argues that party decision makers choose the number and types of Muslim candidates that maximize the chances of capturing seats. One key factor is the size of the Muslim-minority electorate. The greater the share of Muslims among eligible voters, the more Muslims that parties will add to their candidate lists. Candidates who can get out the vote in their own communities offer the greatest benefit to parties, especially as the size of the minority electorate increases. Still, merely symbolic Muslim candidates with the right profile, such as progressive women, can be less threatening to core supporters; they minimize vote losses due to backlash. Thus, another key factor is the expected antipathy among a party’s core voters. The greater the perceived ideological distance, the fewer the Muslim candidates, especially ones with strongly traditional profiles.

Dancygier argues that the social geography of migration and settlement and ideological preferences condition these dilemmas and decisions. Migration and settlement patterns make stylized contrasts between immigrant-origin Muslim communities and non-Muslim European natives more valid than they otherwise might be, given that Muslims and non-Muslims alike are actually quite heterogenous on all sorts of dimensions. The high costs of moving from one country to another produce Muslim migrants who have strong family ties and commitments to kin-network resources in Europe and sending countries. The settlement patterns created by family-based migration, the cost of housing in Europe, and anti-foreigner discrimination produce strong ethnoreligious enclaves in cities. But also nearby, living in these same cities, are Europe’s most cosmopolitan non-Muslims and most resource-deprived working-class residents. Ideological gulfs on religiosity, gender equality, and gay rights separate neighborhoods within and between districts for elections to city halls. Residents in these neighborhoods and even adjacent apartment blocks compete for jobs, public spending, and redistribution. Muslims and non-Muslims living in the same city are far apart in their values and interests, which makes it hard for a party to assemble a winning list of candidates.

To elaborate and test her arguments, Dancygier collected information on city councilors and candidates from 2000 to 2014. She presents data from Austria (more than 2,860 councilors in 2014), Germany (more than 4,280 councilors in 2014), Great Britain (42,650 candidates in England from 2002 to 2013), and Belgium (about 14,000 candidates from 2006 and 2012). As these figures make clear, she gathered data both on council members and on all candidates who competed in Great Britain and Belgium. Her data covered about 70 localities in each of the four countries, which accounted for the majority of Muslims and still varied widely in the local shares of Muslim residents. Dancygier used first and last names to identify each politician’s religion as Muslim or non-Muslim, which included Hindus in the English case; she also had information on each politician’s gender. She and Yotam Margalit also coded national election manifestoes on immigration-related issues, mainly to check an alternative hypothesis that the salience of nondiscrimination and equal treatment explained interparty and intercountry differences in the degrees of Muslim representation.

Two of these countries, Austria and Germany, have comparatively restrictive national citizenship regimes and local electoral laws that give Muslim communities only a small potential to have an electoral impact. In them, Dancygier finds that parties usually excluded Muslim candidates, sometimes offered symbolic candidacies, and generally underrepresented Muslims. The other two countries, Great Britain and Belgium, have permissive citizenship-acquisition regimes and local electoral laws that incentivize minority electoral mobilization. Here she found greater minority-vote-based inclusion and higher levels of Muslim representation.

Dancygier’s work brings political parties and local representation into the literature on the politics of Muslim-minority communities in Europe. For all of that literature’s depth and breadth, scholars usually focus on national-level politics, citizenship regimes and immigration policies, mosque–state and church–state relations, state-led projects of inclusion and representation in national Muslim councils, Muslim activists and Islamic organizations, public opinion, and widely publicized instances of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant political rhetoric. Moreover, Dancygier’s conceptualization of minority inclusion—in this case, an ethnoreligious minority—shifts the focus from the seemingly unique situation of Muslims in Europe to the more general phenomenon of how parties decide to mobilize new electoral support from potential voters who differ on various dimensions from the parties’ traditional supporters. On this basis, Dancygier draws important parallels and contrasts to key works on U.S. political parties’ strategies of minority exclusion and inclusion.

Virtually any criticism I can offer is actually just a description of a different book. For instance, Dancygier seeks to explain why party leaders, elites, selectors, and gatekeepers make the nomination decisions they do. Yet the book offers little discussion of the people who carried out these key roles. The deciders are not named, described, or quoted, although a few of Dancygier’s secondary sources hint at them. Dancygier herself notes that her study does not assess whether levels and types of Muslim-candidate inclusion affect policies, outcomes, or feelings of representation among constituents. What the book does do, however, is present subtle findings based on elegant analyses of richly detailed and original empirical data on who has been running for and sitting on city councils.

Some of the lessons Dancygier offers are optimistic: parties do respond to electoral demography via candidate nominations, just as democratic theorists would hope. Yet other lessons she lays out are not so positive: Europe’s mainstream political parties are becoming ideologically incoherent as they espouse tolerance, diversity, cosmopolitanism, and traditionalism even as they also include vote-maximizing Muslim candidates with little consideration for long-term goals. Worst of all, the victims of the most serious efforts to diversify the religious background of candidates have been the unnominated women who could have been candidates instead. Dancygier found that party nominators’ vote-maximization strategies in Muslim-minority enclaves reduce the shares of both Muslim and non-Muslim women on candidate lists, even in center-left parties supposedly committed to gender equity and even when electoral laws require the inclusion of women on candidate lists. Dancygier laments the absence of class-based and trade-union-based electoral mobilization, which she contends would mitigate dilemmas heightened by ethnoreligious mobilization.

Dilemmas of Inclusion provides the essential analysis of how Europe’s mainstream parties are seeking to win elections in diverse local electorates. Over time, voting eligibility and electoral mobilization of immigrant-origin minorities will only increase. Dancygier’s book shows how European political parties fulfill their core functions of nominating candidates and winning elections when their societies are changing underneath them.