David Kretschmer¹; Lars Leszczensky²

¹ Nuffield College, University of Oxford; ² Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main

In Western societies, the Islamic headscarf is often seen as a marker of “otherness,” signaling religious minority status and cultural difference. While negative attitudes and discrimination against veiled women are well-documented, less is known about how veiling shapes Muslim women’s own attitudes toward religious in-groups and out-groups. This study examines whether Muslim women who wear the headscarf differ in their intergroup attitudes from those who do not and investigates whether differences can be explained by more frequent experiences of discrimination or higher religiosity among veiled women.

We address these questions with data from a survey experiment involving 344 Muslim women aged 16–25 in Germany, one-third of whom regularly wear the headscarf. We assess attitudes toward the religious in- and out-group by letting respondents evaluate experimentally manipulated profiles of fictitious new neighbors with different religious affiliations.

Results show that women who wear the headscarf display a stronger in-group bias than those who do not. They also report experiencing more discrimination and higher religiosity, but this does not explain differences in intergroup attitudes. Further analyses reveal that the stronger in-group bias among veiled women reflects particularly positive attitudes towards highly religious Muslims and greater skepticism towards secular individuals, irrespective of their group affiliation.

These findings highlight the need for a nuanced understanding of intergroup attitudes among Muslim women. While the headscarf is often perceived as a symbol of “otherness”, veiled Muslim women are not generally critical of religious out-groups. Instead, they express particularly strong positive attitudes toward highly religious in-group members.

Anina Schwarzenbach; Livia Zöbeli

University of Bern

This study interrogates the construction of social threat through media framing of extremism in Switzerland over a three-decade period (1994–2024). Employing a corpus of 286,660 articles from major Swiss print and online news outlets, the research examines how identity-related frames evolve in response to both global and domestic events, particularly the reverberations following terrorist attacks abroad. Although Switzerland has not experienced large-scale extremist violence, its media discourse is profoundly influenced by immigration debates and European security concerns, rendering it a unique site for analyzing the social construction of threat.

Grounded in framing theory (Goffman 1974; Entman 1993) and informed by theories of moral panic and risk perception (Cohen 1972; Altheide 2002), the study utilizes a mixed-methods approach. Quantitative analyses, including BERTopic-driven topic modeling and a multilingual BERT-based sentiment classifier, are complemented by qualitative content analysis to reveal dynamic shifts in thematic emphasis and affective tone. Findings indicate that security, political, and identity-related frames dominate Swiss media narratives, with significant intensification of identity framing following high-profile terrorist events and heated domestic debates on immigration and extremism.

A comparative evaluation of left- and right-leaning outlets further underscores a convergence in crisis coverage, despite divergent ideological underpinnings. These results underscore the media’s role not as a passive conduit but as an active constructor of social reality, shaping public perceptions and policy discourses around extremism. This research contributes to broader sociological debates on the interplay between media, identity, and the social construction of threat in democratic societies.

Frank van Tubergen; Stefano Cellini; Christian Czymara²

The Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute

A key hypothesis on intergroup relations in Europe posits that Muslim group identity in Europe is a highly salient dimension, weakening cohesion between members of Muslim and non-Muslim groups. To date, however, studies have studied this hypothesis from the perspective of the ethnic majority, simplifying multi-ethnic societies into binary frameworks of an ethnic majority and a single ethnic minority. This majority-centric perspective overlooks the diversity within minority groups and neglects minority-minority dynamics. To address this gap, this study considers the perspective of minority groups and studies their intergroup attitudes. Our analysis uses three large-scale, probability surveys conducted in the Netherlands between 2004 and 2015, encompassing over 15,000 first- and second-generation immigrants from the two largest Muslim groups (Turks, Moroccans) and two large non-Muslim groups (Suriname, Dutch Caribbean). Our findings suggest that there is no ingroup preference among Muslim groups per se. Rather, while Moroccans rate Turks positively, Turks’ ratings of Moroccans are relatively low. Similarly, Dutch Caribbeans rated Suriname positively, but the same is not true vice versa. As next steps, we will test how these relationships differ depending on the individual level of religiosity and migrant generation status.