The objective of the Inclusive Politics Project is to take research on public opinion and the politics of cultural and religious diversity in a new direction. With few exceptions, research has understandably targeted exclusion—opposition to immigration, prejudice towards minorities, the surge in support for the far right. This project aims to expand the scope of inquiry and to examine instead openings to the inclusion of minorities in contemporary established liberal representative democracies.
This is not a play on words. Not a mere substitution of the word inclusion for exclusion in order to say the same thing but the other way around. We are proposing a different research undertaking. The core premise is to identify the normative premises on which citizens who are not themselves member of a minority are willing to be inclusive. What are they willing to endorse? Where do they draw the line? Any why do they draw it there, and not elsewhere?
This way of posing the research question focuses conceptual and empirical attention on the tolerant—on those who are open to inclusion—and the considerations that matter to them. Their openness to inclusion depends on what inclusion asks of them. Depending on the choices they make, majorities in the public will favor or oppose inclusion.
The results of the first phase of research are reported in The Struggle for Inclusion. The second phase brings together teams of investigators from multiple universities in a collaborative effort to identify pathways to progress to the inclusion of Muslims in Western Europe. The Inclusive Politics Project is coordinated through the Digital Social Science Core Facility (DIGSSCORE) of the University of Bergen and the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS) at Stanford University.