Reactive Incorporation: Populist Boundary-Making, Civil Repair, and Muslim American Political Agency, 2015–2021
This article theorizes "reactive incorporation" as a civil-sphere mechanism through which Muslim Americans contested exclusionary populist boundary-making between 2015 and 2021 by leveraging electoral, legal, and civic institutions to reclaim their status as rights-bearing members of the national community.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
In the study of how societies hold themselves together, there is a long-standing idea that a nation is defined not just by its laws, but by a shared sense of who belongs and who does not. When a political movement rises to power by claiming that a specific group of people is dangerous or alien, it attempts to draw a sharp line around the community, pushing that group to the outside. This is often called boundary-making. In a healthy democracy, however, the institutions that make up the public sphere—the courts, the right to vote, and the ability to form organizations—are supposed to be open to everyone, even those who have been labeled as outsiders. The question researchers ask is what happens when a group is officially marked as "uncivil" or a threat to the nation, yet the very system that excludes them remains open enough for them to fight back. Does the label stick, or can the targeted group use the system's own tools to prove they belong?
This article examines a specific six-year period in the United States, from 2015 to 2021, to see how Muslim Americans responded when they were repeatedly named as the enemy in a populist political campaign. The study focuses on a time when a presidential candidate and later the president called for a ban on Muslims entering the country, a policy that was eventually enacted through executive orders. The researchers wanted to know if this intense pressure would cause the community to withdraw from public life, as some theories of discrimination might predict, or if it would trigger a different kind of reaction. By looking at election records, court cases, and the growth of community organizations, the study finds that the community did not retreat. Instead, they used the courts, the ballot box, and their own community networks to organize a massive, coordinated response. The author calls this process "reactive incorporation," a way of describing how a group that has been pushed to the edge uses the institutions of democracy to push back and reclaim their place in the national story.
The story begins with a political strategy that divides the nation into three parts: the pure people, a corrupt elite that protects them, and a dangerous third group that threatens them. In this specific era, that third group was identified as Muslim Americans. The political rhetoric painted them as a security risk and a cultural outsider, incompatible with American identity. This was not just talk; it became policy when the government issued orders restricting travel from several Muslim-majority countries. The expectation in some social science theories is that when a group is treated this way, they become afraid, hide, and stop participating in society. The data from this period, however, tells a different story. While it is true that many individuals felt unsafe and avoided public spaces, the community as a whole did not disappear from the political stage. Instead, the exclusion acted as a catalyst, pushing the community to organize with a new intensity and clarity.
The first sign of this reaction appeared in the voting booths. Before the height of the exclusionary rhetoric, there was a significant gap between how many eligible Muslim Americans said they intended to vote and how many were actually registered to do so. In 2016, sixty percent of eligible voters were registered, while eighty-one percent said they planned to vote. By 2020, after years of political targeting, the registration rate had climbed to seventy-eight percent, and the gap between intention and action had nearly vanished. This was not just about filling out forms. The same surveys showed that Muslim Americans were volunteering for campaigns and attending town hall meetings at rates that matched or exceeded those of other religious groups. At the highest level of politics, the 2018 elections saw a historic surge in Muslim candidates winning office, including the first Palestinian American and the first Somali American elected to Congress. These victories were not just personal successes; they were a public declaration that the people labeled as outsiders were, in fact, legitimate representatives of the nation.
While voters were stepping forward, lawyers were stepping into the courtroom. The legal battle against the travel ban became a central arena for this response. Organizations representing Muslim and Arab Americans filed lawsuits challenging the government's orders, arguing that the bans were unconstitutional because they discriminated based on religion. Even though the Supreme Court ultimately upheld the travel ban in 2018, the legal fight itself achieved something important. It forced the government to defend its actions in court, turning a political slogan into a legal debate about rights and fairness. Throughout this process, the plaintiffs and their lawyers presented Muslim Americans not as security threats, but as rights-bearing citizens entitled to equal protection under the law. The legal system, which the exclusionary policy tried to bypass, became the stage where the community asserted its standing. The fight did not end in a total victory on the policy, but it succeeded in keeping the question of belonging alive in the public record and in the courts.
Beyond the ballot and the courtroom, the community built a stronger infrastructure of organizations and coalitions. Groups that had existed before the political crisis expanded their reach, forming new alliances and creating campaigns specifically designed to counter the ban. One major coalition, named "No Muslim Ban Ever," grew from about one hundred supporting organizations to more than two hundred in just a few years. These groups did more than protest; they documented thousands of incidents of bias, provided legal aid, and organized voter registration drives in mosques across the country. Surveys of mosques showed that the number of these religious centers hosting voter registration events rose significantly during this period. This growth in civic organization meant that the community had a durable structure to support its members, turning a moment of crisis into a long-term capacity for political action.
The study concludes that this pattern of response reveals a structural limit in how exclusionary populism works within a constitutional democracy. The political movement succeeded in drawing a symbolic line that placed Muslim Americans outside the circle of "the people," but it could not close the door on the institutions that allow citizens to contest that line. The community used the courts, the vote, and their own organizations to answer the exclusion with a powerful, organized presence. This does not mean the discrimination disappeared or that the community faced no harm; the data shows that bias incidents increased and that many individuals felt fear. However, the political response was not one of silence or withdrawal. It was an active, multi-front effort to rewrite the story of who belongs. The research suggests that when a targeted group has access to these democratic tools, they can transform the pressure of exclusion into a force for organized political agency, proving that the boundaries of a nation are not fixed by a single political movement but are constantly being negotiated by the people who live within them.
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