Research

Dissertation

My dissertation explores resistance to new mosques. With funding from DAAD Short Term Research Award and Provost’s Award for Graduate Research, I conducted fieldwork in Chicago suburbs and Berlin regarding eight mosques, four in each locality, to explore factors leading to resistance or no resistance toward new mosques. The data collected from interviews and document analysis highlights the crucial role of the Muslim community and local government in minimizing resistance. When the Muslim community works with the local government on the permit application and the government is sympathetic to the mosque plans, resistance is minimal. By keeping the initial plans away from the public, the Muslim community can reach an agreement with the local government and control the discourse. However, divided government and public knowledge about the mosque plan early on create an opening for the public’s resistance, further fueling the government’s resistance. When an opening arises, resistance can be prevented only in a liberal and highly educated neighborhood.

Resistance towards new mosques can thus be minimized if Muslim communities find allies in local governments, work with them on the permit application, and control the discourse. While the nuisance level, neighborhood characteristics, and organized groups matter, as the literature suggests, their effect can be minimized by the Muslim community and local government’s actions. Thus, the results contradict a popular idea in the literature that mosques would not be resisted if the Muslim community reached out to their new neighbors and shared its plans with the public. On the contrary, the detailed case studies suggest that reaching out to the residents, especially at the beginning, might intensify resistance.

These results are currently being tested in a conjoint survey experiment funded by the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy. Conjoint experiments allow researchers to test several causal hypotheses simultaneously and, thus, mimic the decision-making processes in the real world, where people balance different attributes simultaneously (Hainmueller, Hopkins, & Yamamoto, 2013). Respondents evaluate ten pairs of proposals for new places of worship with fully randomized attributes and decide whether to support or oppose each project. The results will show each feature’s impact on residents’ decision to resist.

Published Work

Schnabel, Eliska (2021). “Local rebels: How local governments get around federal and state laws to resist new mosques.” Journal of Urban Affairs, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2020.1854613

Abstract:

Counties and municipalities are de jure subservient to higher-level governments. However, local governments often exercise powers reserved for state or federal governments and even engage in illegal acts. Such local noncompliance acts have been underexplored in the scholarly literature, especially regarding less visible methods. To fill this gap, this article uses cases of resistance to new mosques in Chicago’s suburbs to illustrate how municipalities use delays, denials, and revenues to get around federal and state laws to violate minority rights. The three methods improve a typology of local noncompliance and illustrate the limits and possibilities of local democracy. Local governments can ignore new federal and state laws; vote on policies and permits; delay decisions or implementation; use fiscal powers; and engage in symbolic acts.

Other Work in Progress

Schnabel, Eliska. “Impact of Foreigners on Immigration Attitudes at the Local Level.” Paper Presented at the Midwest Political Science Association Meeting and American Political Science Association Conference in 2019.

I am currently rewriting this conference paper into a journal article. In this paper, I explore why cities adopt immigrant-friendly stances by looking at which cities have joined the initiative Welcoming Cities. Previous research (Huang and Liu 2018) indicates that cities that are liberal and central, and have a larger percentage of the foreign-born population, lower median income, larger population, and are in states with Welcoming America state affiliates, are more likely to participate in the Welcoming Cities and Counties Initiative. However, by utilizing multilevel modeling, my research shows that it matters what state the city is in, and the results are highly dependent on the size of the city. Put it simply, factors leading smaller cities to join the Initiative differ from the factors relevant for larger cities.

Future Projects

I will publish the conjoint experiment chapter of my dissertation as a journal article and develop the rest into a book manuscript focusing only on the governmental side of the story: how do institutions affect resistance to new mosques? I will include three paired comparisons of six democratic countries. The first of the three chapters will compare two federal countries, the United States and Germany. The second one will compare two unitary countries, France and the United Kingdom. Finally, the third chapter will look at two more recently democratic countries historically more homogeneous, Poland and the Czech Republic. By including countries with different institutional configurations and levels of diversity, I will be able to test the dissertation theory further and make the conclusions more generalizable.

In addition to the book and journal article coming out of my dissertation, I will also further explore institutional discrimination and impediments to minority rights. In one paper, I will look at the censorship of minority voices in the media. I will conduct a content analysis of local and national media to determine whether media censor letters to the editor and exclude letters from readers with foreign-sounding names more than from those with American names. I will then compare the local and national media results to see which one is more inclusive of minority voices.

Another paper will examine zoning decisions to see whether minority applicants face more obstacles in the application process than majority applicants and whether obstacles are more common when the application concerns visible symbols of minority religions or cultures, or whether minority applicants face resistance regardless of the property type. I already collected information on all zoning relief applications in DuPage County in the Chicago suburbs. I will add two more Illinois counties, Cook (Chicago) and La Salle (rural county), to see whether there is a difference between how a city, suburban, and rural counties treat zoning relief applications from minorities.

The second broad future research area concerns immigration laws and their implementation at the local level. How often do local governments not comply with higher-level laws and policies? What factors can predict compliance or noncompliance with higher-level laws? Does compliance vary across countries and/or policy areas? Why? I will answer these research questions using immigration laws and laws disproportionally affecting immigrants in a book or series of articles. First, I will compile a dataset of the laws at the national and regional level in the United States and Europe and explore variations among states. Then, I will look at the implementation of the national and regional policies at the local level. Finally, I will study the frequency of noncompliance in select cities and explain why cities comply or do not comply with higher-level laws.

This research will show why it may be problematic to use regional or national laws to predict behavior. Immigration researchers often study the effects of passed bills and laws. For example, Filindra and Manatschal (2020) use U.S. state-level integration policies to measure the policy effect on the political engagement of immigrants. However, my “Local Rebels” article clearly shows that local governments do not always follow higher-level policies and laws. My future research will look at the extent of such noncompliance, which will help researchers decide whether to keep using higher-level laws as causal variables in their research or whether local implementation of laws would be a better predictor of the outcome.