Resentment and populist attitudes among Turkish and Moroccan Belgians

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article investigates the determinants of populist attitudes among ethnic minorities. It breaks with conventional studies of the so-called losers of globalization, which focus almost exclusively on the majority population. Minorities were not spared by the economic and cultural displacements of late modernity and often suffer structural disadvantages vis-à-vis the majority population. Displacement and discrimination threaten the social position of established ethnic minorities – many of which arrived in Europe as guestworkers in the 1960s. Threatened, at once, by persistent skepticism form the majority population and new arrivals into the political community, it is plausible that such established minority groups share in the populist resentment currently sweeping continental Europe. Using the 2014 Belgian Ethnic Minority Election Study, we investigate how resentment might trigger the populist attitudes of anti-elitism and a preference for unmediated popular sovereignty, not only among the most vulnerable, but among those who occupy intermediate social positions.