Accord­ing to the Fed­er­al Sta­tis­ti­cal Office, around 21.85 mil­lion peo­ple in Ger­many have a so-called “migra­tion back­ground”. Despite this sub­stan­tial num­ber, despite increas­ing crit­i­cism towards gen­er­al­iz­ing por­tray­als of peo­ple with migra­tion his­to­ries, and despite research demon­strat­ing and con­firm­ing the oppo­site, those very peo­ple with migra­tion his­to­ries are still fre­quent­ly por­trayed as a homoge­nous group in pub­lic dis­course in Germany.

In our new research note “Who can par­tic­i­pate? #2”, we once again show their ver­sa­til­i­ty and diver­si­ty using the exam­ple of the par­ty pref­er­ences of peo­ple with migra­tion his­to­ries in Ger­many. Con­trary to the often-wide­spread assump­tion that peo­ple with migra­tion his­to­ries pre­fer cer­tain par­ties, the oppo­site turns out to be true. Peo­ple with migra­tion his­to­ries have just as diverse par­ty pref­er­ences as peo­ple with­out a migra­tion back­ground. More­over, when it comes to the ques­tion of polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion of peo­ple with migra­tion his­to­ries, it is not the so-called “migra­tion back­ground” that turns out to be the deci­sive fac­tor. Rather, oth­er inter­sect­ing fac­tors such as gen­der, socio-eco­nom­ic sta­tus, edu­ca­tion, or expe­ri­ence of dis­crim­i­na­tion can be just as important.

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