How prejudice shapes public perceptions of minority-organized spaces: the case of community education

Abstract

ABSTRACT As European societies become continuously more diverse, understanding the dynamics of minority rights endorsement becomes increasingly crucial. This paper investigates the variations in citizen support for minority rights and how these endorsements differ across various minority groups and purposes. This study focuses on minority organized supplementary schooling for minoritized youth in Flanders, Belgium as a case study for examining the endorsement of rights. Using new observational evidence, we first show that there is significant variation in citizens’ opposition to community education. Subsequently, we conduct a survey experiment to unravel what explains public opposition to certain minority-organized initiatives, but not others. Specifically, we examine the causal effect of the organizing ethnic community (i.e. Italian, Chinese, or Moroccan) and the school's stated purpose (i.e. heritage language training or math tutoring) on public support. The study reveals that public approval of such minority-organized spaces is not uniform across initiatives. It is influenced by the perceived cultural threat posed by specific minority groups and the nature of the initiative. This research is the first to comprehensively examine public perceptions of minority-organized spaced. The findings indicate that deeper research into the support for minority rights and freedoms is imperative.