Same religion, different treatment. The role of origin country characteristics in employers’ decisions to hire Muslims

Abstract

Using data from a cross-nationally harmonised correspondence test, we examined how employers in five European labour markets (Britain, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Spain) respond to applications received from Muslim job seekers with ancestry from 22 different countries of origin. Drawing on the interdisciplinary literature on anti-Muslim prejudice, we expected that callbacks would depend on characteristics of applicants’ origin countries that could signal cultural value incompatibility and political and military oppression, thus triggering perceptions of symbolic and security threats, respectively. The results point to lower callback rates for Muslims, the higher the level of authoritarianism and gender inequality in their origin country. Results for authoritarianism are especially robust across different operationalizations of threat and model specifications. We also find that the association between authoritarianism and callbacks was only statistically significant for men, indicating that Muslim men are especially at risk of exclusion from employment opportunities.