A Well-Known Gap, An Incomplete Explanation
Anti-Muslim sentiment is measurably stronger in eastern Germany than in the western part of the country. Researchers have documented this pattern repeatedly over the years, across multiple surveys and different methods. However, a persistent question remained only partly answered: why exactly does this gap exist, and can it be fully explained by the factors researchers typically examine?
A study published in Frontiers in Sociology by Frank Kalter of the University of Mannheim and Naika Foroutan of the German Center for Integration and Migration Research set out to answer that question directly. Drawing on a large, carefully designed survey, their research both tests familiar explanations and introduces a new one worth understanding.
Setting the Political Backdrop
Context matters here. Germany’s right-wing populist party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), has grown into a significant political force nationwide over the past decade. Even so, its support skews heavily toward the East. In the five eastern German states that once made up the former East Germany, the AfD received more than 20% of the vote in recent state elections, reaching 27.5% in Saxony. Western states, by contrast, topped out around 13%, with some regions as low as 5%.
This electoral pattern mirrors broader findings on attitudes toward immigrants and Muslims specifically. Since research consistently shows anti-Muslim sentiment concentrated more heavily in the East, understanding its underlying drivers carries real relevance for German politics and society more broadly.
A Rich, Carefully Designed Dataset
To investigate this question thoroughly, the researchers analyzed data from 6,625 telephone interviews conducted across Germany between mid-2018 and early 2019, part of a larger study called “Postmigrant Societies: East-Migrant Analogies.” Notably, the survey deliberately oversampled residents of eastern Germany, ensuring a robust sample for detailed comparison.
Rather than relying on a simple East-West split, the researchers classified respondents into five distinct categories based on both birthplace and current residence, plus one additional dimension: whether East-born respondents living in the East explicitly identified as “East German” when given that option, rather than simply as “German.”
How the Study Grouped Respondents
| Group | Description | Number of Respondents |
|---|---|---|
| West-born in West | Born and currently living in western Germany | 3,739 |
| East-born in West | Born in eastern Germany, now living in the West | 440 |
| West-born in East | Born in western Germany, now living in the East | 374 |
| East-born in East, no self-identification | Born and living in the East, identifies simply as “German” | 1,308 |
| East-born in East, explicit self-identification | Born and living in the East, explicitly identifies as “East German” | 741 |
Testing the Familiar Explanations First
Before introducing anything new, the researchers first checked how well existing, well-established explanations accounted for the East-West gap. These included demographic factors like age and gender, socioeconomic factors such as education and income, personality traits including authoritarianism, and how often respondents had contact with Muslims in daily life.
Taken together, these familiar factors explained a substantial portion of the differences between most of the five groups. Notably, once demographic and socioeconomic composition were considered, differences largely disappeared for East-born residents now living in the West, and for West-born residents now living in the East. Contact with Muslims, in particular, helped explain much of the remaining gap for East-born residents without explicit self-identification.
However, one group consistently resisted full explanation: East-born residents still living in the East who explicitly identified as “East German.” Even after accounting for every standard factor in the model, this specific subgroup retained significantly higher anti-Muslim sentiment than the reference group of West-born residents in the West. Something else, the researchers concluded, needed to be part of the explanation.
A New Angle: Competing for Recognition
To address this remaining gap, the researchers turned to social identity theory, a well-established framework in psychology and sociology. According to this theory, people naturally compare their own group against other groups to maintain a positive sense of identity. When that comparison feels unfavorable, people sometimes cope by comparing themselves instead against a different, seemingly lower-status group.
Applied here, the researchers’ argument runs as follows: some East Germans, having experienced real and persistent economic disadvantage plus underrepresentation in leadership positions even three decades after reunification, may feel inadequately recognized by the dominant West German population. Rather than comparing themselves unfavorably against the West, some may instead compare themselves against another group, Muslims, as a way of maintaining a more positive collective self-image. The researchers term this dynamic a “race for second place.”
Crucially, this pattern is expected to appear most strongly among those who explicitly identify with the East German ingroup, since the underlying psychological mechanism depends on a sense of shared group membership and belonging.
What “Non-Recognition” Actually Looks Like in the Data
To test this idea, researchers used a clever survey design. Half of respondents were asked whether they believed Muslims faced non-recognition in German society, while the other half were asked the identical question about East Germans specifically. This split allowed for a direct, apples-to-apples comparison.
The results proved striking. Across nearly every group, respondents recognized that Muslims face real disadvantages in Germany, with fairly consistent agreement scores across different subgroups. Understanding of East Germans’ disadvantages, however, varied dramatically by group. West-born respondents living in the West showed the least awareness of any such disadvantage. East-born respondents with explicit self-identification, by contrast, perceived non-recognition of East Germans even more strongly than they perceived non-recognition of Muslims, the only group for which this reversal occurred.
What the Study Found and Confirmed
| Research Question | Finding | Confirmed? |
|---|---|---|
| Do standard factors (demographics, socioeconomics, personality, contact) explain the East-West gap? | Yes, for most groups, but not for East-born residents with explicit East German self-identification | Partially |
| Does perceived non-recognition explain higher anti-Muslim sentiment in this specific subgroup? | Yes, this factor was strongly linked to anti-Muslim sentiment specifically among self-identifying East Germans | Confirmed |
| Does “outgroup mobility threat” (discomfort with Muslim advancement) predict anti-Muslim sentiment generally? | Yes, across all groups, and most strongly among self-identifying East Germans | Confirmed |
| Is the link between mobility threat and anti-Muslim sentiment specifically stronger for self-identifying East Germans? | Yes compared to most other groups, though not significantly stronger than East-born residents without self-identification | Partially confirmed |
Fear of Being Overtaken
The researchers also examined a related concept called “outgroup mobility threat,” essentially a discomfort with the idea of another group, in this case Muslims, advancing socially or economically. Survey items captured this through statements about feeling uneasy at the prospect of more Muslims reaching leadership positions in the labor market, or concern that Muslim educational success might come “at the expense” of others.
This factor turned out to be a consistently strong predictor of anti-Muslim sentiment across virtually every group studied. Unsurprisingly, though, it proved most pronounced among East-born respondents with explicit self-identification, both in terms of how strongly they expressed this threat perception and how strongly that perception predicted their anti-Muslim attitudes.
Together, perceived non-recognition and outgroup mobility threat helped meaningfully narrow, though not entirely close, the puzzling gap that standard explanations left unexplained for this particular subgroup.
An Important Caveat: Only One Piece of the Puzzle
To their credit, the researchers are careful not to overstate their findings. Authoritarian attitudes and weaker support for pluralist democratic values remained strongly associated with anti-Muslim sentiment across every group examined, not just among self-identifying East Germans. Recognition and competition dynamics, in other words, represent one additional contributing factor layered on top of already well-established explanations, not a replacement for them.
The authors also stress that their findings apply specifically to a subgroup, roughly 741 respondents out of the full sample, who both live in the East and explicitly identify with an East German identity. The broader population of eastern Germany, including the substantial group that does not explicitly self-identify this way, showed patterns much closer to those already explained by standard demographic and attitudinal factors.
Limitations Worth Understanding
Since the underlying data comes from a single survey wave rather than a longitudinal study tracking the same people over time, researchers cannot fully establish which factors cause which. It remains possible, for instance, that stronger anti-Muslim attitudes contribute to feelings of non-recognition, rather than the reverse. Untangling this direction of causality, the authors acknowledge, remains an important task for future research.
Additionally, the researchers note that some variables in their models, particularly authoritarianism and democratic values, might themselves be influenced by other factors not fully captured in this analysis, complicating any strictly causal interpretation of the results.
Why This Research Matters Beyond Germany
The authors suggest their findings may extend beyond this specific German context. Anti-Muslim sentiment, they argue, can function as something like a broader indicator of attitudes toward diversity, pluralism, and democratic values more generally. Since similar status-related anxieties have been documented among other groups navigating social change elsewhere, the recognition-based framework developed here could plausibly help explain comparable intergroup dynamics in other countries facing their own social and political divides.
Ultimately, this research adds meaningful nuance to a widely discussed but often oversimplified topic. Rather than reducing East-West attitude differences to a single cause, the study demonstrates that multiple factors, from demographics and personality traits to more complex psychological dynamics around recognition and status, work together to shape this stubborn and consequential divide in German public opinion.
Reference: Kalter F and Foroutan N (2021) Race for Second Place? Explaining East-West Differences in Anti-Muslim Sentiment in Germany. Front. Sociol. 6:735421. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2021.735421
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