Cultural Threat Research Articles

Three Roads to Populism? An Italian Field Study on the 2019 European Election

ObjectivesWe predicted populist orientation and vote for two populist parties, the Five Star Movement (FSM) and the League, in the 2019 European election by focusing on perceived economic threat, perceived cultural threat, dissatisfaction with representative democracy, and on first‐order interactions.MethodWe surveyed a quota sample of the Italian adult general population (N = 1,504) and tested a latent moderated structural equations model aimed at predicting participants’ populist vote and populist orientation.ResultsPerceived cultural threat and dissatisfaction with democracy were positively associated with populist orientation. Dissatisfaction with democracy was positively associated with votes for the FSM, while perceived cultural threat was positively associated with votes for the League. Perceived economic threat was negatively associated with votes for the League.ConclusionPopulist orientation and populist vote share just some predictors, and are associated with main effects only, but not with interactions between perceived cultural, economic, and political variables.

Exploring the link between personality traits and European attitudes towards refugees

Attitudes towards refugees are formed via complex interactions between socioeconomic factors, perceptions of cultural threat and personality traits. Yet despite the widespread social changes the European refugee situation has generated throughout the continent, no previous literature has adequately examined these interactions in that context. This study addressed that gap by testing the relationship between personality traits and European attitudes towards refugees in the context of the European refugee crisis by conducting an ordinal regression analysis of data obtained from online surveys that we distributed in four European countries (N = 6,000).Questions were aligned with descriptors used in the Five Factor model of personality traits and a proxy of the Honesty-Humility trait used in the HEXACO model. Our results indicate that Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Honesty-Humility are negatively associated with refugee prejudice. Findings about Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness are mixed. Moreover, our results revealed that intercultural contact has a positive impact on attitudes towards refugees and that the valence of this contact plays a more significant role than the frequency of contact. Given that attitudes towards refugees have been found to correlate with asylum policy preferences, these discoveries are of considerable value to people working in asylum policy settings, as they provide them with a more nuanced understanding of the factors influencing election results; especially during a period where refugee resettlement is a salient issue.

Constructing Chineseness as other in the evolution of national identity in South Korea

ABSTRACT This study traces the way the evolving nature of the Korean national identity has shaped the construction of the Chineseness of immigrants as others. Two immigrant groups, Chinese immigrants called Hwagyo and Korean-Chinese referred to as Joseonjok, have constituted the majority of foreigners in Korea during different historical eras. Although Koreans assumed both represented ‘Chinese’ people, I argue that the core of their Chineseness was defined differently according to the evolving sense of the Korean subjectivity. The growth of the national economy and the culturally advanced and orderly society constituted the sources of the national character and provided legitimate grounds to discriminate against Chinese immigrants who were assumed to pose economic and cultural threats. This study suggests that the different logic of ‘othering’ is derived from the evolution of the Korean national identity in response to the nation’s changing economic and political circumstances.

Immigrants, inclusion, and the role of hard work: Exploring anti-immigrant attitudes among young people in Britain

Previous research on youth attitudes towards immigration has tended to focus on explaining why young people are more accepting of immigrants than their elders. In this article, therefore, we focus on the young people that are opposed to immigration. First, we use nationally representative survey data from young adults in England to highlight that a substantial minority hold negative attitudes towards immigrants. In the second half of the article, we then turn to qualitative data (in-depth interviews) to explore how young people talk about and justify holding these negative attitudes. Both the qualitative and the quantitative data suggest that anti-immigrant attitudes among young people are linked to the perception that immigrants pose an economic and cultural threat, and to the spread of culturalised forms of citizenship. What the qualitative data also reveal, however, is how these distinct discourses reinforce one another and how they intersect with other types of prejudice. We will argue that the idea of Hard Work is central to understanding anti-immigrant attitudes, as this has become a deeply-embedded cultural norm that is being used to include and exclude (immigrants and others), and to distinguish between who is deserving of membership of British society and who is not.

THE VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ETHNOCULTURAL COMMUNITIES OF THE NORTH IN THE DOCUMENTARIES (THE FILM OIL FIELD)

The article investigates the one of types of contemporary visual sources in Anthropology - the ethnographic films about the indigenous peoples of the Russian North. The authors focus on the documentary film Oil Field (Oil Field; Ivan Golovnev 2012) that depicts a life of the family Piak in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug-Yugra. Focusing on the daily life of a Khanty family, authors develop a narrative structure, in which the protagonist Vasilii Piak received an identity and began to command the viewers’ emotions. Particular attention is paid to the visual representation of the traditional forms of economy (reindeer herding) in Khanty and Nenets culture, including the indigenous people’s relation to nature in the North. Authors consider also the interaction between indigenous peoples and oil companies in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug. The paper states that oil development has become the context of contemporary life among northern minorities. On the one hand, oil companies present an environmental and cultural threat to the indigenous inhabitants. On the other hand, they bring important elements of life to the North: fuel, food, roads, work, a system of benefits and other matters which have become part of the local northern reality. Thus, for many Khanty, oil companies are an important source of family income. This is perhaps one of the most difficult moments in situation of the relations of among contemporary northerners, who have already adapted to this tense but mutually advantageous proximity.

Right-wing populism in Poland and anti-vaccine myths on YouTube: Political and cultural threats to public health

ABSTRACTThe article describes the growing anti-vaccine movements in the context of right-wing populism, which is also gaining popularity around the world. According to the authors, these two phenomena have a lot in common, and the activists of the anti-vaccine movements often intermingle with populist right-wing movements. The connection between anti-vaccine activists and populists is illustrated in the analysis of discourse and anti-vaccine arguments presented in materials on the Polish-language YouTube channel, as well as in comments on YouTube forums. The slogans of the defence of ‘ordinary people’ against ‘corrupt elites’ in the medical dimension indicate a dislike for ‘medical conspiracy’ and doctors corrupted by pharmaceutical concerns. Just like right-wing populists, opponents of vaccines in Poland refer to nationalist slogans and have an aversion to the European Union. In addition to the rejection of the WHO standards on sex education and the sceptic attitude to environmental changes, the rejection of vaccines is another manifestation of the conspiracy ideologies of right-wing populists in Poland that may affect health and health policy. In the area of public health, this means rejecting medical knowledge and replacing it with myths and prejudices proclaimed by anti-vaccine movements, among others.

Neoliberal Risk Management and Challenges of the Anthropocene Epoch in the Optics of English-Language Cultur Studies

The article represents a brief overview of current discussions about social and cultural threats and the crisis of the neoliberal risk management model in English-language culture studies. The article deals with the relationship of polemics about environmental threats, contradictions between the neoliberal model of management and the politics of time in the society of late capitalism. The central point of these discussions is the problem of overlapping different temporal regimes or criticism of the neoliberal model of synchronization. The search for strategies to overcome the ongoing social and cultural crisis involves revising the boundaries between the cultural and socio-political spheres. Besides, the emphasis from the discursive level is transferred to the network interconnections of affects, everyday practices and macro-politics.

КРИЗИС КУЛЬТУРЫ В СОВРЕМЕННОЙ РОССИИ: ЭКСПЕРТНОЕ МНЕНИЕ И ОЦЕНКИ НАСЕЛЕНИЯ

The article examines an issue of the crisis in culture, as one of the most relevant and discussed ones in modern humanitarian discourse, not only in Russia, but also abroad. The processes of strengthening the country’s security are inextricably linked to the circumstances of a socio-cultural nature, the issues of the cultural, civilizational originality and identity of society. Sociocultural security determines the ability of a society to self-reproduce and spiritually progress basing on national originality and cultural community. The results of recent public opinion studies within Russians clearly record the perception among the population of threats to the sociocultural order associated with issues of identity, a decline in morals and culture, with reduced access to cultural values and cultural inequality. The article presents results of the sociological research “Monitoring of public opinion of the population regarding current sociocultural threats”, conducted in 2019, analyzes the public opinion of Russians and experts on the manifestations of the cultural crisis and sociocultural threats in modern Russia

Prawica, lewica i postawy wobec imigrantów. Poglądy Polaków na imigrację i ich dynamika na tle trendów europejskich

Political right, political left, and attitudes towards immigrants. Poles’ opinions of immigration and their dynamics against the backdrop of European trends The aim of the analysis is to demonstrate how individual convictions and opinions on immigration are connected with a subjective political identity, defined by one’s position on the left or right side of the political scale. The article focuses on the case of Poland, examining it in the context and in comparison to the processes taking place in other European countries. The analysis refers to the data of the European Social Survey (nine waves from 2002 to 2018). The results reveal that in Western European countries anti-immigrant attitudes are more connected with self-identification as political right, while in Central-Eastern Europe such correlation either does not exist, or is weaker and more rare. Poland is in an earlier phase of the migration cycle (it has small and relatively new immigrant populations), and the institutionalization of political cleavages within the party system is less advanced than in Western Europe. These factors lead to the situation where self-identification as political right on the one hand and scepticism towards immigration on the other are not correlated. Moreover, the results show that during the period under study, voters of the main political parties in Poland showed increasing support for the presence of immigrants in the country’s economy, while the influence of foreigners on the country’s culture became a polarizing question. Among Poles who are sceptical about immigration, the perceived cultural threat is articulated more strongly than the economic threat.

In Response to Cultural Threat: Cultural Self-Awareness on Collective Movement Participation

This study investigated the role of cultural self-awareness, an individual’s awareness of culture’s influence on the self, on collective movement participation. We posited that individuals who were highly aware of their culture’s influence on them would more likely perceive self-relevance of cultural circumstances. In the context of a cultural threat, such perception of self-relevance would lead to psychological and behavioral reactions that affirm one’s collective identity. We tested our predictions during a collective political movement in Hong Kong. Results showed that among Hong Kong university students, the higher the cultural self-awareness, the more they participated in the collective movement. The relationship was mediated by increased pride in Hong Kong and a more exclusive Hong Kong identity. The findings highlighted the importance of metacognitive reflection of the self in collective processes.

Culture, Race, and Health: Implications for Racial Inequities and Population Health.

Improving the health of the total population may be insufficient in eliminating racial disparities in population health. An expanding commitment to understanding social determinants of health aims to address the social conditions that produce racialized patterns in health inequity. There is also a resurging and evolving interest in the influence of cultural barriers and assets in shaping racial inequities in health. The meaning and function of culture, however, remains underspecified. This paper synthesizes analogous but fragmented concepts of cultural threat related to social and racial inequity as examined in public and population health, psychology, sociology, communications, media studies, and law. It draws on an existing typology of culture and social inequity to organize concepts related to cultural racism. Employing a transdisciplinary approach, the paper integrates multiple scholarly perspectives on cultural threat to frame cultural racism as cultural systems that promote false presumptions of white superiority relative to non-whites. The lack of shared conceptual grounding and language regarding cultural threats to health hinders a more precise identification and measurement of cultural processes as well as comparisons of relative prevalence and influence of pathways linking cultural processes and social inequity. Evaluating intersections among culture, structures, and racism is a valuable analytical tool for understanding the production of social and racial inequities in health. To adequately address health inequities rooted in systemic racism, it is imperative to discuss the function of cultural racism in shaping population health in the United States. Building a culture of health and achieving health equity requires that we assess cultural racism in a more meaningful way. Cultural processes are commonly referenced in health inequity scholarship, but the empirical literature generally lags behind the conceptual emphasis. A rich literature across disciplines has substantively engaged conceptualizations of culture and cultural processes, the importance of these processes as part of a system of racism, and mechanisms that may link cultural threats to health. When integrated, this literature offers essential insights for ways population health may address the complex issue of eradicating racial disparities in health.

Black Out-group Marriages and Hate Crime Rates: A Cross-sectional Analysis of U.S. Metropolitan Areas

Objectives: This study introduces an indicator of racial out-group marriage to the research on hate crime. Drawing upon a variant of group threat theory, we hypothesize that Black out-group marriage with Whites will be positively related to anti-Black hate crime rates insofar as such marriages are perceived as transgressions of cultural boundaries. Informed by Allport’s contact theory, we hypothesize that Black out-group marriage with Whites will be negatively related to anti-Black hate crime rates insofar as such marriages indicate intercultural accommodation. Methods: Using data for a sample of U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas circa 2010, we assess our hypotheses with two operationalizations of levels of hate crime—incidence rates and victimization rates. Results: Our results reveal that levels of Black out-group marriages with Whites are positively related to the Black hate crime victimization rate but not related to the incidence rate. Conclusions: Our analyses suggest that any salutary effect of intercultural accommodation associated with interracial marriage is overwhelmed by the influence of the perceived cultural threat and intensification of animus for the “at-risk” population for perpetrating anti-Black hate crimes.

Cognitive and Emotional Outcomes of Latino Threat Narratives in News Media: An Exploratory Study

Objective: Although negative news portrayals can influence attitudes and beliefs about immigrants, little is known about how different types of threat narratives influence Americans’ emotions and perceptions of Latino immigrants specifically. This study examines cognitive and emotional responses to Latino threat narratives in the news media. Method: We conducted an online experiment using a posttest-only randomized design to assess participants’ perceptions of Latino immigrants and their emotional responses to threat narratives in news media. Participants (N = 208) were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. In one experimental group, participants (n = 68) read a news story about Latino immigrants as economic threats; in the other, participants (n = 70) read a news article about Latino immigrants as cultural threats. In the control group, participants (n = 70) read an article that did not implicate Latinos as threats. We used ANCOVA to test mean differences in responses to threat narratives across the experimental and control groups. Results: Participants who read the story about a Latino economic threat reported more intense negative emotions and significantly higher levels of perceived realistic threats from Latino immigrants than participants in the control group. Participants who read the article discussing a Latino cultural threat reported more intense positive emotions and significantly higher levels of perceived symbolic threats from Latino immigrants than the control group. Conclusions: Findings suggest that different types of Latino threat narratives have distinct influences on individuals’ emotions and threat perceptions of Latino immigrants. Implications for social work practice are discussed.

Is There a Backlash Against Immigration From Richer Countries? International Hierarchy and the Limits of Group Threat

Why do immigrants from particular countries systematically face more opposition? To resolve inconsistencies of prevailing group‐threat theories, I reintroduce a long‐standing hypothesis stipulating that people have a disposition for maintaining status hierarchy between ethnic groups. Accordingly, independent of perceived economic or cultural threat, natives are more likely to prefer immigrant groups of higher status based on the development level of the group's national origin. To test this argument, I exploit a substantial provincial variation of immigration flows and attitudes in Spain—one of the only countries that has received immigrants from both less and more developed countries. Consistent with my hypothesis, I demonstrate that anti‐immigration attitudes are more widespread in areas with immigrants from less developed countries regardless of their economic and cultural characteristics. I further document that many voters perceive stable group hierarchies and that these preferences are more predictive of anti‐immigration attitudes in lower‐status immigration contexts. Overall, these results suggest that even culturally similar and economically beneficial immigrant groups from poorer countries can face public opposition due to their lower‐status national origin, highlighting the independent role of group‐status perceptions in politics.

Countering technology-related, biogenic, social, and cultural threats, terrorism and ideological extremism, as well as cyber threats and other sources of hazard to society, economy and the state. Speech of the deputy minister of health of the Russian Federation S.A. Kraevoy

Speech of the deputy minister of health of the Russian Federation S.A. Kraevoy

Countering technology-related, biogenic, social, and cultural threats, terrorism and ideological extremism, as well as cyber threats and other sources of hazard to society, economy and the state. Оpening Speech of the chairman of the priority council, vice-president of the RAS, academician V.P. Chekhonin

Оpening Speech of the chairman of the priority council, vice-president of the RAS, academician V.P. Chekhonin

A Digital Baron for a Digital Age: Chris Hughes and Neoliberalism’s Ascendancy in Journalism

This article examines news media coverage surrounding Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes’s purchase of the magazine The New Republic in March 2012 in order to reveal the ways in which media narratives situated him as a new kind of media owner for a new kind of media age. This textual analysis is embedded within the framework of metajournalistic discourse, aiming to interrogate the extent to which characterizations of Hughes are aligned with emerging digital practices and neoliberal ideals. This article pays particular attention to coverage in the immediate aftermath of his purchase as well as to the new owner’s letter to readers and subscribers, ultimately arguing that Hughes is constructed as a self-enterprising and digitally savvy media owner, uniquely situated to preserve journalism by bringing tech industry philosophies and practices into the field. An abiding conflict between market logics and journalistic norms underscores the broader danger in knitting together neoliberal ideals of entrepreneurialism and startup culture with notions of how journalists can and should respond to financial and cultural threats of digital innovation to their industry.

Political mobilisation and public discourse in new immigrant destinations: news media characterisations of immigrants during the 2006 immigration marches

ABSTRACTIn 2006, millions of immigrants engaged in boycotts and marches for immigrant rights. Many of these protests occurred in new destinations, places with little prior history of collective mobilisation by non-citizens. We focus on the U.S. South, a region noteworthy for the recent, unprecedented growth in its non-citizen population and its unexpected role in the 2006 protests. Drawing from a unique dataset of immigration-related news stories from ten newspapers across the South from 2005 to 2007, we examine variation in public immigration discourse during this ‘unsettled’ period of heightened political mobilisation and marked public anxiety around immigration. We supplement this analysis with a close examination of immigration news coverage in English and Spanish-language newspapers in South Carolina. Regional analysis reveals minimal shifts in public immigration discourse during this time period; however, the South Carolina case study reveals subtle yet noteworthy variation in the cultural categories used to label immigrants, the moral characterisations of immigrants, and the salience of the immigrant-native boundary. The English-language press increasingly portrayed immigrants from Mexico as cultural threats. After the marches, the Spanish-language press emphasised immigrants’ work ethic. These findings have implications for our understanding of social dynamics in new destinations and the cultural dimensions of political mobilisation.

Resisting hostility generated by terror: An agent-based study.

We propose an agent-based model leading to a decrease or an increase of hostility between agents after a major cultural threat such as a terrorist attack. The model is inspired from the Terror Management Theory and the Social Judgement Theory. An agent has a cultural identity defined through its acceptance segments about each of three different cultural worldviews (i.e., Atheist, Muslim, Christian) of the considered society. An agent’s acceptance segment is composed from its acceptable positions toward a cultural worldview, including its most acceptable position. An agent forms an attitude about another agent depending on the similarity between their cultural identities. When a terrorist attack is perpetrated in the name of an extreme cultural identity, the negatively perceived agents from this extreme cultural identity point of view tend to decrease the width of their acceptance segments in order to differentiate themselves more from the threatening cultural identity. We generated a set of populations with cultural identities compatible with data from a survey on attitudes among a large sample representative of the population of France; we then simulated the reaction of these agents facing a terrorist attack from Muslim extremists. For most populations, the average attitude toward Muslims becomes more negative. However, for some specific populations, we noticed the opposite effect as the average attitude of the population toward Muslims becomes less negative. In these populations, the Muslim agents strongly differentiate themselves from the terrorists’ extreme cultural identity, and the other agents are aware of these changes. These reactions are due to particular properties of their cultural identities that are identified in this paper.

The Know Nothings in Louisiana by Marius M. Carriere Jr.

Reviewed by: The Know Nothings in Louisiana by Marius M. Carriere Jr. Lawrence N. Powell The Know Nothings in Louisiana. Marius M. Carriere Jr. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. 2018. ISBN 978-1-4968-1684-9. 219 pp., cloth, $70.00. Louisiana nativism often leaves historians scratching their heads. As the nation hurtled toward secession and war, the nativism movement burst onto the electoral scene like a shooting star and fizzled out nearly as fast. Its main vehicle, the American Party, was cloaked in secrecy, its adherents told to answer "I know nothing" when queried about it. It seemed more Illuminati than mainstream political movement, what with its three degrees of membership and speakeasy admission rituals. But by harnessing the period's turbocharged ethno-nationalism, the Know Nothing movement came within a whisker of enshrinement as the nation's second major party. And nowhere else in the Deep South did the American party make deeper inroads than in Louisiana. New Orleans was the reason. Far and away the agricultural South's largest city, not to mention a gateway for heavy immigration from Ireland and Germany, New Orleans was home to a large foreign-born population. In this, it resembles such other border state cities as Baltimore, Cincinnati, and St. Louis—except for one oddity. Nationwide, the American Party was famous for its staunch opposition to Catholicism. In Louisiana, Know Nothings drew a surprising number of Catholics under their banner. Who were the men who led the Know Nothing movement in Louisiana? Marius Carriere Jr. finds that several were anticlerical French Catholics who wrangled with their ultramontane Irish counterparts over papal supremacy and church property. They included former Whigs like Charles Gayarre and ex-governor A. B. Roman, too. Carriere unearths a couple of surprises: that upwardly mobile lawyers favored the Democratic Party because of the greater promise of advancement, while "wealthy younger, and middle-age 'political leaders'" gravitated to the American Party (54). In truth, Know Nothingism was "Whiggery in disguise," a safe haven for former Whigs who had been cast adrift after the capsizing of their national organization (50). As instructive as Carriere's midlevel discoveries may be, the real value of The Know Nothings in Louisiana is the picture it paints of American nativism during one of its earliest high tides. It's a timely book. The rhetoric of these antebellum xenophobes, never mind their favored remedies, has a contemporary ring. Dirt-poor, the famine Irish who swept into New Orleans between 1830 and 1860 were scapegoated for rising crime, falling [End Page 421] wages, vanishing jobs, and lawless elections. Such were the perils of opening the doors to the "worst classes of the common laborers of the monarchical governments of Europe" (quoted on 63). Back then, the support for curbing immigration or deporting recent arrivals was somewhat muted. (However, the Know Nothings did oppose an early Homestead Bill for fear it would encourage more immigration.) The young republic was in the throes of a commercial revolution, and labor was scarce. Instead, Know Nothings crusaded for voter suppression—another remedy with present-day resonance. They demanded extending the naturalization period from five to twenty-five years, followed by an additional two-year waiting period. And they enforced voter identification measures. Anyone speaking with an Irish brogue or a German accent was required to present valid naturalization papers. But here is where the parallels between past and present diverge. In the 1840s and '50s voter fraud was rampant. Democratic judges manufactured votes by turning their benches into naturalization mills. Know Nothings fought fraud with force. Between 1853 and 1857, telling the difference between the city's polling places from cage matches required real skill. The denouement was predictable. The sectional rifts over slavery that ravaged the Whigs and disrupted the Democrats also destroyed the American Party. But in New Orleans, class tensions also contributed their mite. The economic elites who had incited white natives against European newcomers panicked when Democratic officeholders, elected with immigrant votes, began to threaten the subsidies that the business community had lavished on pet railroad projects. To these elites, that agenda was as vital, maybe more so, than the putative social and cultural threat...