Abstract
The Roma have been and still are a target of prejudice, marginalization, and social exclusion across Europe, especially in East-Central European countries. This paper focuses on a set of stereotypical, emotional, and behavioral evaluative responses toward Roma people selected as representing the underlying components of anti-Roma bias. Employing network analysis, we investigated if attitude strength is associated with stronger connectivity in the networks of its constituent elements. The findings from representative surveys carried out in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, France, and Ireland supported our assumption, as high attitude strength toward the Roma resulted in stronger connectivity in all pairs of high- versus low-attitude-strength networks. Our finding yields a solid theoretical framework for targeting the central variables—those with the strongest associations with other variables—as a potentially effective attitude change intervention strategy. Moreover, perceived threat to national identity, sympathy, and empathy were found to be the most central variables in the networks.
Highlights
The Roma are among the most disenfranchised, socially unaccepted, and morally vilified ethnic minority groups in Europe and especially in East-Central European countries (Fraser, 1995; Ladányi, 2001; Pogány, 2006; Tileagã, 2006)
Out of 351 possible edges, networks of high attitude strength were found to have a greater number of non-zero edges (Hungary: 166 vs. 160; Romania: 177 vs. 153; Slovakia: 173 vs. 147; France: 184 vs. 145; Ireland: 173 vs. 145)
The Causal Attitude Network (CAN) model (Dalege et al, 2018) was used to examine network connectivity in terms of the evaluative responses on the presidential candidates and found that network connectivity predicts the extent to which individuals are interested in political campaigns
Summary
The Roma are among the most disenfranchised, socially unaccepted, and morally vilified ethnic minority groups in Europe and especially in East-Central European countries (Fraser, 1995; Ladányi, 2001; Pogány, 2006; Tileagã, 2006). As a culturally and linguistically diverse group, Roma people are portrayed as beggars, criminals, profiteers, and lazy, being a target of marginalization and social exclusion, as well as perpetual discriminatory and violent practices on an interpersonal, institutional, and national level (van Baar, 2011; Feischmidt et al, 2013). Empirical research shows that anti-Roma stereotypes revolve around criminality, laziness, and receiving undeserved benefit from the state (e.g., Enyedi et al, 2004; Kende et al, 2017, 2020; Villano et al, 2017). Research shows that the Roma are perceived as both dangerous and derogated (e.g., Imhoff and Bruder, 2014; Bilewicz et al, 2017; Hadarics and Kende, 2019), which indirectly implies that they are both rejected from the perspective of threatening conventional norms and looked down upon as a low-status group—being low in both dimensions of the model
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