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AbstractThis study focuses on public opinion towards the face veiling of Muslim women and investigates the possibility of identifying different groups of citizens supporting distinct combinations of arguments regarding face veiling criticisms. Two groups are expected to argue for or against face veiling. Also, two other groups are expected to vary depending on their idea of liberalism inherent in face‐veiling arguments: a specific way of life versus respect for different ways of life. Using latent class (regression) analysis, the findings show that different groups emerged and that the political leftists were more diverse regarding argument patterns than the political rightists. Following the debate of why many political leftists have negative attitudes towards religious practices, this study does not find empirical support that anti‐Muslim and anti‐Islam attitudes systematically differ between the observed groups.

This study focuses on public opinion towards the face veiling of Muslim women and investigates the possibility of identifying different groups of citizens supporting distinct combinations of arguments regarding face veiling criticisms. Two groups are expected to argue for or against face veiling. Also, two other groups are expected to vary depending on their idea of liberalism inherent in face-veiling arguments: a specific way of life versus respect for different ways of life. Using latent class (regression) analysis, the findings show that different groups emerged and that the political leftists were more diverse regarding argument patterns than the political rightists. Following the debate of why many political leftists have negative attitudes towards religious practices, this study does not find empirical support that anti-Muslim and anti-Islam attitudes systematically differ between the observed groups. ; Diese Studie beschäftigt sich mit der öffentlichen Meinung zur Gesichtsverschleierung von muslimischen Frauen und untersucht, ob sich verschiedene Gruppen von Bürgern:innen unterscheiden lassen, die verschiedene Kombinationen von Argumenten unterstützen. Zwei Gruppen werden erwartet, die entweder konsequent alle Argumente zugunsten einer Gesichtsverschleierung unterstützen oder ablehnen. Ausserdem wird davon ausgegangen, dass zwei weitere Gruppen unterschieden werden können, die je nach ihrer Vorstellung von Liberalismus, die den Argumenten zur Gesichtsverschleierung innewohnt, variieren: eine bestimmte Lebensweise oder als Respekt gegenüber unterschiedlichen Lebensweisen. Die Ergebnisse der latenten Klassenanalyse (Regressionsanalyse) zeigen, dass in der Tat verschiedene Gruppen unterschieden werden können und dass die politische Linke in ihren Argumentationsmustern vielfältiger ist als die politische Rechte. Im Anschluss an die Debatte, warum viele politische Linke negative Einstellungen gegenüber religiösen Praktiken haben, findet diese Studie keine empirischen Hinweise, dass sich anti-muslimische und anti-Islam Einstellungen systematisch zwischen den beobachteten Gruppen unterscheiden. ; Cette étude se concentre sur l'opinion publique à l'égard du voilement du visage des femmes musulmanes et examine la possibilité d'identifier différents groupes de citoyens qui soutiennent des combinaisons distinctes d'arguments concernant les critiques du voilement du visage. On s'attend à ce que deux groupes se prononcent favorablement ou pas sur le port du voile. De plus, deux autres groupes sont censés varier en fonction de leur idée de libéralisme inhérent aux arguments relatifs au voilement du visage : un mode de vie spécifique contre le respect de modes de vie différents. En utilisant une analyse de classe latente (régression), les résultats montrent que différents groupes ont émergés. En outre, en ce qui concerne les modèles d'arguments, la gauche politique était plus diversifiée que la droite. Suite au débat sur les raisons pour lesquelles une grande partie de la gauche a des attitudes négatives envers les pratiques religieuses, cette étude n'a pas un appui empirique qui confirmerait que les attitudes anti-musulmanes et anti-islam diffèrent systématiquement entre les groupes observés.

It is not only immigration and the incorporation of immigrants into society that serve as challenges for post-industrialised countries, but also rising inequality and poverty. This article focuses on both issues and proposes a new theoretical perspective on the determinants of immigrant poverty. Building on comparative welfare state research and international migration literature, I argue that immigrants' social rights – here understood as their access to paid employment and welfare benefits – condition the impact which both the labour market and welfare system have on immigrants' poverty. The empirical analysis is based on a newly collected dataset on immigrants' social rights in 19 advanced industrialised countries. The findings confirm the hypotheses: more regulated minimum wage setting institutions and generous traditional family programmes reduce immigrants' poverty more strongly in countries where they are granted easier access to paid employment and social benefits.

On the role of parties as important channels for people to voice their preferences there is a sound consensus in the literature. Traditional socio-economic concerns have been more and more displaced by culturally fought issues such as immigration and European integration. Scholarly works, however, have paid less attention how, if at all, parties combine different cultural issues. The primary aim of the analysis is to investigate if and under which conditions parties link immigration and European integration issues to address the growing discontent in the population with these issues. Our expectation is that parties endorse different strategies depending on the party competition, in particular the presence of a populist challenger. The analysis is based on a quantitative content analysis of press releases and newspapers articles published in the 12 weeks preceding the 2014 EP election in five European countries (Austria, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom).

Immigration and the resulting increasing ethnic diversity have become an important characteristic of advanced industrialised countries. At the same time, the majority of the countries in question are confronted with structural transformation such as deindustrialisation and changes in family structures as well as economic downturn, which limit the capacities of nation-states in addressing rising inequality and supporting those individuals at the margins of the society. This paper addresses both issues, immigration and inequality, by focusing on immigrants' socio-economic incorporation into the receiving societies of advanced industrialised countries. The aim of this paper is to explain cross-national variation in immigrants' poverty risks. Drawing on the political economy as well as the migration literature, the paper develops a theoretical framework that considers how the impact of the national labour market and welfare system on immigrants' poverty risks is moderated by the integration policies, which regulate immigrants' access to the labour market and social programs (or immigrants' economic and social rights). The empirical analysis draws on income surveys as well as a newly collected data set on economic and social rights of immigrants in 19 advanced industrialised countries, including European countries as well as Australia, and North America, for the year 2007. As the results from multilevel analysis show, integration policies concerning immigrants' access to the labour market and social programs can partly explain cross-national variations in immigrants' poverty risks. In line with the hypothesis, stricter labour market regulations such as minimum wage setting reduce immigrants' poverty risks stronger in countries where they are granted easier access to the labour market. However, concerning the impact of more generous social programs the reductive poverty effect is stronger in countries with less inclusive access of immigrants to social programs. The paper concludes by discussing possible explanations for this puzzling finding.

The results of Eurosceptic parties in the recent European parliament election provide further evidence that the "permissive consensus" on European integration blurred. This paper focuses on the structure of the debate on EU integration issues. Which EU integration issues and positions do parties put forward? Can the debate on EU integration issues be subsumed in one or several dimensions? Do they reflect national political conflicts such as the left-right and the 'new politics'/cultural divide? Or do they form one unique or several EU-specific dimensions, e.g. national sovereignty versus integration? In order to address these questions, this paper departs from the assumption that debate on European integration is multidimensional in its nature and therefore entails a multitude of issue areas. In other words, it does not look at how socio-economic and cultural issues are related to European integration but focuses on its components, i.e. particular EU-specific policies such as EU-wide employment, environment, immigration and monetary policy. The paper departs from the cleavage theory on political di-visions and different approaches transferring them to EU politics. Two points should be noted; first, this paper does not compare the debate on European integration issues between the national level and the EU level, but whether domestic divisions are reflected at the EU level. Second, it is not concerned with the general ideo-logical profile of political parties on EU integration issues, but on EU issues that parties communicated through press releases. By doing this, the paper is concerned with the salient EU issues that parties touch upon.

Recent research on the transformation of West European party systems emphasises that cultural issues such as immigration have gained in importance besides the traditional socio-economic cleavage. While this literature shows that parties address not only cultural but also economic is-sues, it has paid less attention on whether parties combine cultural and economic issues. In this paper we focus on immigrants' social rights by analysing if and how mainstream parties combine immigration and redistributive issues. Drawing on Faist (1995), we distinguish three different perspectives how political actors, here mainstream parties, might react to the welfare chauvinist claims that aim to restrict immigrants' social rights. Our analysis relies on party manifestos in Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom between 1999 and 2011. The results of the anal-ysis indicate that variation is found among party families, in particular among the left. Even though the purpose of the paper is not to 'prove' that the populist challenge explains how the mainstream left-wing parties behave, the results allow nonetheless for interpreting mainstream parties' strategic combination of welfare and immigration issues as a response to anti-immigration and anti-integration issues raised by populist challengers.

Abstract:  Proponents of constitutional patriotism advocate the promotion of a political national identity. Whether a national identity founded on common political values is viable, however, remains a matter of dispute. The Swiss nation is one of the few empirical cases cited by those who argue that a political national identity can be a sufficient guarantor of institutional stability and social coherence; indeed, Switzerland is widely regarded as a prototype of the political nation. The aim of our analysis is to empirically test this claim. In doing so, we rely on classical typologies of national identity. We propose to use a more finely graded typology than the usual dichotomies, however – one which allows for combined types – and to focus on individual perceptions of national identity at the mass‐ and elite‐levels. The empirical analysis of whether the Swiss nation can correctly be classified as a political nation draws on data from mass and MP surveys. Our conclusion is that the Swiss imagine their nation in both political and cultural terms, and the essence of their cultural identity is Swiss linguistic pluralism and regional diversity.

This article starts from the observation that most voters know relatively little about positions and plans of political parties, especially when European Union politics is concerned. One reason for this could be that the main sources for political information, party communication and mass media coverage, provide voters only little concrete information about positions and plans of political parties. We ask how concretely, respectively vaguely, political parties and mass media communicate political positions prior to the 2014 European Parliament elections. We conducted a quantitative content analysis of all European Union–related press releases from 46 national political parties and of all European Union–related articles of 14 national quality newspapers from 7 European countries 12 weeks before the 2014 European Parliament elections. Our analysis shows that press releases as well as media coverage contain more concrete political positions on European Union issues than vague political statements. Other than expected, newspaper coverage provided the public with less concrete information than political actors did. Nevertheless, countries vary with regard to the extent to which party communication or newspaper coverage contain vague statements. We cannot find empirical support that the communication of concrete political positions depends on a party's "extremity" of issue position or on the type of issue.

Abstract
According to literature, biased information processing increases with political sophistication. The logic behind this relationship is that political sophisticates possess greater cognitive skills and knowledge to defend their prior beliefs. Although political sophistication can be understood as a multidimensional concept, existing research primarily uses general political knowledge as a proxy to assess it. Therefore, we introduce a more rigorous measure of sophistication that gauges individuals' ability to justify their attitudes with substantive and well-elaborated arguments and put the classic measure of political sophistication to a test. We study these mechanisms in a direct-democratic setting via an online survey, in which 898 Swiss-German voters are exposed to a tailored counterargument on a political referendum. Our results indicate that individuals with higher levels of sophistication evaluate counter-attitudinal information less favorably and hold more stable opinions. While we did not find support for the hypothesis that sophistication leads to selective exposure to consonant information, our analysis points to a reverse mechanism: individuals with lower levels of sophistication exhibit a higher likelihood of exposure to dissonant views. Notably, these results align with the trends reported for general political knowledge and corroborate the validity of using general political knowledge as a proxy for political sophistication.

Abstract
This article focuses on how exposure to different media genres relates to two components of attitudes, Muslims as a group and Islam as a religion. It also highlights how these components mediate the relationship between media exposure and behavioral intention, namely voting intention towards banning veiling in public spaces. The analysis builds on an online survey conducted in Switzerland. We found that exposure to specific media genres is not equally associated with attitudes towards Muslims versus attitudes towards Islam. Contrary to our expectation, we did not find the association to be stronger when it came to influencing attitudes towards Muslims as compared to influencing attitudes towards Islam. However, our findings clearly showed that it matters whether people consume news via television or newspapers, especially mass-market (commercial television and tabloids) versus upmarket news (public television and quality newspapers). Attitudes towards Muslims living in Switzerland are more negative among those consuming mass-market news than those consuming upmarket news. Anti-Islam attitudes, however, were only associated with reading newspapers—both tabloids and quality newspapers. The findings provided only partial support for the mediating role of attitudes towards Muslims and Islam concerning the indirect relation between media exposure and voting intention towards banning veiling.

Abstract
The aim of this article is to show whether distinct varieties of populist attitudes emerge within a society, and how they relate to citizens' Islamophobic attitudes. The study is based on a representative survey conducted in Switzerland in 2019. We used latent class analysis and multinomial regression analyses to identify latent subgroups, yielding five classes of populist attitudes: direct democracy devotees, individuals with populist tendencies, moderate populists, radical anti-elite populists, and radical-universal populists. Compared with the direct democracy devotees class, members of the moderate and the radical-universal populists classes are significantly more likely to hold anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant attitudes and to be politically right-wing, while radical anti-elite populists are not associated with either anti-Muslim attitudes or a right-wing ideology.