Exclusionary Attitudes Research Articles

Methodology for the disliked: a call for situated ethics in close-up research with anti-gender groups

The close-up study of far-right groups often involves an intense emotional burden for researchers working with participants they dislike or even feel threatened by. This article proposes to think of the ‘disliked’ as a category of participants whom the researcher finds ideologically or morally objectionable due to their exclusionary attitudes. It calls for an approach of situated ethics to account for the particularities and complexities of disliked groups that can remain uncharted if studied from a distance. Furthermore, the article addresses the need to understand ethics and safety as entangled when researching disliked groups, since researchers must cautiously examine and handle the overlap between them. To explore this topic, the article draws on in-depth fieldwork with anti-gender groups in Spain and engages with the experience of empathising with people whose discourse and beliefs challenge the researcher's own well-being.

Voted in, standing out: Public response to immigrants' political accession

AbstractHow do dominant‐group natives react to immigrants' political integration? We argue that ethnic minority immigrants winning political office makes natives feel threatened, triggering animosity. We test this dynamic across the 2010–2019 UK general elections, using hate crime police records, public opinion data, and text data from over 500,000 regional and local newspaper articles. While past work has not established a causal relationship between minorities' political power gains and dominant‐group animosity, we identify natives' hostile reactions with a regression discontinuity design that leverages close election results between immigrant‐origin ethnic minority and dominant‐group candidates. We find that minority victories increase hate crimes by 67%, exclusionary attitudes by 66%, and negative media coverage of immigrant groups by 110%. Consistent with power threat and social identity theories, these findings demonstrate a strong and widespread negative reaction—encompassing a violence‐prone fringe and the mass public—against ethnic minority immigrants' integration into majority settings.

Welfare solidarity in multi-ethnic societies: can social investment reduce the anti-immigrant bias?

Migration flows have diversified western societies, challenging the political viability of inclusive welfare states. This is very clear in research on perceptions of deservingness to social benefits, which consistently shows that immigrants are considered as less deserving of collective help than natives. At the same time, welfare states are being reoriented towards social investment, putting more emphasis on services that strengthen human capital and improve access to employment rather than on redistribution. In this article we ask whether the shift towards a social investment welfare state is likely to reduce the immigrant deservingness penalty. Theoretically, we rely on two perspectives: social trust and identity theory. Following the literature on social trust, we expect the reorientation of welfare states towards social investment to reduce the negative impact of diversity on solidarity, as those interventions are to an extent immune to free-riding. Alternatively, according to social identity theory, we expect a similar in-group bias independent of the intervention. We rely on vignette experiments conducted in 2021 in Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US to compare the immigrant deservingness penalty between social compensation and social investment interventions. Results show no difference between the immigrant deservingness penalty across the social intervention types, suggesting exclusionary attitudes are driven by in-group favouritism.

Repression, Interests and Outgroup Attitudes: A Survey Experiment in Post-Coup Myanmar

Can outgroup attitudes improve in a repressive context? Existing literature highlights how shared victimization generated under repression facilitates recategorization of identity boundaries, thereby ameliorating exclusionary attitudes. We propose an alternative pathway through which outgroup attitudes can improve. We argue that individuals update their outgroup attitudes when they perceive outgroups as contributing to a shared goal. Rather than being an identity-based response, we suggest that this cognitive process involves instrumental considerations. We evaluate this theory using a web-based survey experiment carried out in post-coup Myanmar and examine attitudes toward the Rohingya, a severely marginalized group. We find that trust and support for Rohingya citizenship rights improve when the Rohingya people are framed as contributing to the pursuit of a shared goal. We also find that this is driven primarily by individuals who have more at stake in the overthrow of the coup regime compared to those with less at stake.

Building a wall around the welfare state, or around the country? Preferences for immigrant welfare inclusion and immigration policy openness in Europe

Existing research on welfare chauvinism, which involves preferences about the inclusion or exclusion of immigrants in welfare programmes, often overlooks individual preferences regarding immigration policy openness (the number of immigrants allowed into a country). This article posits that these two dimensions should be considered together. The reason is that the implications of including or excluding migrants in welfare programmes vary significantly depending on whether a country admits few or many immigrants. Utilizing data from two waves of the European Social Survey across 23 European countries, we develop a typology of individual stances that encapsulate attitudes towards both immigration policy openness and immigrant inclusion in the welfare state. Our analysis reveals that the distribution of these stances varies considerably across European nations. We further examine how the probability of endorsing one of these typologies correlates with individual socio-economic characteristics, especially education. We find that higher education levels are linked to a higher likelihood of supporting either a combination of openness and inclusion or, to a lesser extent, openness paired with welfare exclusion. Additionally, more exclusionary attitudes are observed in countries where welfare usage by migrants is higher.

Softening the Stigma of Incarceration with Personal Narratives

Existing research shows that first-person narratives can reduce exclusionary attitudes against marginalized groups. In this article, we test how they might mitigate stigma against formerly incarcerated people. We outline two mechanisms: (1) signaling, wherein sharing an autobiographical narrative improves others’ perception of oneself, and (2) role-taking, wherein the content of the narrative leads the audience to see themselves in the author’s place, thereby changing their evaluation of the author. We test these mechanisms using data from a vignette-based online experiment. We examine how a sample of college students respond to a hypothetical classmate who discloses a history of incarceration. Overall, we find support for the signaling mechanism. We also find that desired social distance falls primarily because the narrative increases the classmate’s perceived warmth (e.g., sincerity, trustworthiness, friendliness, etc.). Findings suggest advocates and institutions should create opportunities to obtain and present credentials and skills that will credibly signal warmth.

Feeling insecure and excluding immigrants: Relationship between subjective risks and welfare chauvinism

AbstractWe argue that subjective insecurity plays an important role in explaining welfare chauvinism, which is defined as the restriction of immigrants' access to social benefits and public services. Additionally, macroeconomic performance and welfare regime are closely related to opinions about the social rights of migrant groups. We test these propositions, using a multilevel ordered logit model using the 8th wave of ESS. It is found that subjective unemployment and income risks are not overlapping with objective measures, and self‐assessed insecurity has a strong and positive effect on welfare chauvinism. Moreover, we demonstrate that, even for the most socio‐economically advantaged respondents, subjective risk increases the likelihood of chauvinistic welfare attitudes. At the macro level, higher rates of GDP per capita growth decrease welfare chauvinism, and Central and Eastern European welfare regime increases the likelihood of exclusionary attitudes in relative terms. The results are robust across different estimation techniques and inclusion of alternative contextual factors.

Indexing Philosophy in a Fair and Inclusive Key

AbstractExisting indexing systems used to arrange philosophical works have been shown to misrepresent the discipline in ways that reflect and perpetuate exclusionary attitudes within it. In recent years, there has been a great deal of effort to challenge those attitudes and to revise them. But as the discipline moves toward greater equality and inclusivity, the way it has indexed its work has unfortunately not. To course correct, we identify in this article some of the specific changes that are needed within current indexing systems and propose a new model that could embody them. We use the Diversity Reading List in Philosophy as a case study and PhilPapers as a basis for comparison. The model we propose not only represents the discipline in a more inclusive and fair way, but it is also efficient, easy to use or implement, and adaptable for a variety of contexts.

The Rise of the Right-Wing Good Party (İYİP) in Turkey: Authoritarian Turn, Anomie, and Regulatory Nostalgia

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the rise of a newly established nationalist right-wing political party in Turkey—namely the Good Party (İYİP)—with respect to the concept of anomie. In contrast to the mainstream literature, which exclusively concentrates on the concept of populism in its analysis of the rise of right-wing political parties, this study explains the İYİP’s advancement using Institutional Anomie Theory, along with the fall of the ‘Turkish Dream’, wherein the democratic and economic aspirations of the 2000s were hindered in the 2010s by the authoritarian turn and the entrenchment of the neoliberal economic order. In other words, a contradiction between historically embedded goals (democratization and wealth) and the political means exercised (authoritarian turn and neoliberalism) led to anomie in Turkey, which created a window of opportunity to be exploited by a right-wing political party. The article concludes, based on İYİP rhetoric, that the backlash against the authoritarian turn may surface in the form of regulatory nostalgia for the parliamentary system and exclusionary attitudes towards Syrians living in Turkey.

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

Nemzetközi Rendészeti Figyelő VIII.

Aim: The aim of the briefing notes on foreign law enforcement literature is to find sources that provide thought-provoking messages for researchers. All the reviews in issue VIII have this virtue.Methodology: Among the theoretical subjects, it is worth noting that the autonomy of police science and its close relationship with public administration is a matter of debate. The problem can be read about in József Beke’s review. Tibor Bánáti stresses the importance of scientifically proven methodology when he talks about recommendations on interrogation tactics which, without a solid and proven theoretical basis, could jeopardise the effectiveness of investigations. Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris wrote about the obstacle of establishing the material truth in their book published in 2009 in Hungarian. In criminology, methodological requirements are the so-called Daubert criteria: scientifically proven methodology, published results, setting of error margins, critical reception. Findings: The demanding research work cannot avoid uncovering the dysfunctions of the institutions, especially when such serious issues arise as discrimination appearing in the actions of the authorities, which can only be curbed after a thorough investigation. Bernadett Bacsó’s paper provides information on this endeavour. The phenomenon of prejudice against the Islamic religion and against citizens of Muslim origin often arises. Krisztián Kakócz quotes an author who warns that sometimes it is our lack of kno wledge of concepts that lies behind exclusionary attitudes towards foreigners. There are lessons to be learnt from a dogmatic analysis of the legal concepts of trafficking and smuggling, especially when combined with a criminological perspective. The delineation of guilt and vulnerability in the relevant crime categories can only be successful in this way, as confirmed by the foreign research presented by Mónika Herczeg. The Observer concludes with a presentation by Tamás Molnár on the criminology of climate change. He describes a book that „clearly points to the fact that the prevailing socio-economic and ideological interests and the system that serves them pose the greatest threat to the environment.” Ferenc Irk, the most prominent domestic practitioner of the topic, has recently published a book on the metamorphosis of the exploitation of man and his environment.Value: Foreign literature emphasises the most important virtues of law enforcement research when it affirms the autonomy of scientific thinking and the responsibility of the researcher, and requires a well-established, widely published methodology that takes into account the margins of error. According to the definition in Volume XVIII of Révai’s Great Dictionary, science is „a system of critically validated, i.e. true, knowledge about a subject.” Autonomy does not tolerate the silencing of critical discourse, and the assumption of responsibility is a precondition for theory to develop solutions in cooperation with practice in order to avoid infringing and ineffective official interventions.

Discriminatory attitudes against unvaccinated people during the pandemic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, sizeable groups of unvaccinated people persist even in countries with high vaccine access1. As a consequence, vaccination became a controversial subject of debate and even protest2. Here we assess whether people express discriminatory attitudes in the form of negative affectivity, stereotypes and exclusionary attitudes in family and political settings across groups defined by COVID-19 vaccination status. We quantify discriminatory attitudes between vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens in 21 countries, covering a diverse set of cultures across the world. Across three conjoined experimental studies (n = 15,233), we demonstrate that vaccinated people express discriminatory attitudes towards unvaccinated individuals at a level as high as discriminatory attitudes that are commonly aimed at immigrant and minority populations3-5. By contrast, there is an absence of evidence that unvaccinated individuals display discriminatory attitudes towards vaccinated people, except for the presence of negative affectivity in Germany and theUSA. We find evidence in support of discriminatory attitudes against unvaccinated individuals in all countries except for Hungary and Romania, and find that discriminatory attitudes are more strongly expressed in cultures with stronger cooperative norms. Previous research on the psychology of cooperation has shown that individuals react negatively against perceived 'free-riders'6,7, including in the domain of vaccinations8,9. Consistent with this, we find that contributors to the public good of epidemic control (that is, vaccinated individuals) react with discriminatory attitudes towards perceived free-riders (that is, unvaccinated individuals). National leaders and vaccinated members of the public appealed to moral obligations to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake10,11, but our findings suggest that discriminatory attitudes-including support for the removal of fundamental rights-simultaneously emerged.

COVID-19-related anxieties do not decrease support for liberal democracy.

The COVID‐19 pandemic led to widespread fear among the population. Early studies suggested that this resulted in exclusionary attitudes and increased support for discriminatory policy measures. We still lack an understanding of the longer‐term, potentially erosive consequences that COVID‐19‐specific anxieties may carry for citizens' commitment to liberal democratic norms. In this research note, we present evidence from an original experiment in which we manipulate individuals' cognitive accessibility of their fears related to COVID‐19. We implemented this experiment in Hungary and Romania – two cases where illiberal attitudes are most likely to amplify under conditions of fear – a year and a half after the outbreak of the pandemic. The results show that our intervention is successful in elevating respondents' levels of worry, anxiety and fear when thinking about infectious diseases like COVID‐19. However, these emotions do not carry secondary effects on individuals' levels of right‐wing authoritarianism, nationalism or outgroup hostility, nor do they affect preferences for specific discriminatory policy measures aimed to fight a potential resurgence of COVID‐19. We discuss these findings in light of the literature on the demand‐side determinants of democratic backsliding and the consequences of emotions on political behaviour.

The Friday Effect: How Communal Religious Practice Heightens Exclusionary Attitudes

AbstractDoes attending communal religious services heighten the tendency to express exclusionary attitudes? Drawing on responses from thousands of Muslims, we identify how the ritual Friday Prayer systematically influences congregants' political and social attitudes. To isolate the independent role of this religious behavior, we exploit day-of-the-week variation in survey enumeration, which we assume to be plausibly uncorrelated with likely confounders, including self-reported religiosity. In our primary analysis, six variables charting various modes of intolerance each indicate that frequent attenders interviewed on Fridays (that is, proximate to the weekly communal prayer) were significantly more likely to express sectarian and antisecular attitudes than their counterparts. To test the potential mechanism behind this tendency, we rely on a controlled comparison between Egyptian and Algerian subgroups, as well as an original survey experiment in Lebanon. Evidence from both analyses is consistent with arguments that elite political messaging embedded in religious rituals spurs much of the observed variation.

Exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants: Globalization and configurations of ascribed and achieved status across 14 European countries

Research on immigration attitudes focuses on two dimensions of exclusionary preferences: those related to achieved characteristics and those related to ascribed characteristics. First, we expand this work by unpacking how individuals blend attitudes across these two dimensions. Applying latent profile analysis to a comprehensive set of exclusionary indicators from the European Social Survey in 2002 and 2014, we observe seven attitudinal configurations: exclusionary, moderate individualistic, individualistic, tolerant, religious, illiberal liberalism, and racial capitalism. Second, using multinomial logistic regression with country fixed effects, we explore how configurations relate to a period where European countries experienced overall economic de-globalization, but more intensified cultural globalization. Consistent with integrated threat theories, we find that exclusionary views were less common in countries that became economically de-globalized. Conversely, we find no effect of cultural globalization on the growth or decline of the exclusionary configuration. We conclude by considering the policy implications of these results on current immigration policy.

Immigration Threat Amplifiers and Whites’ Immigration Attitudes in the Age of Trump

The US public’s immigration attitudes have become more favourable in recent years, yet the Trump administration (2017-2021) was the most restrictionist on immigration of any modern US presidency. What key sociopolitical factors were associated with holding more exclusionary immigration attitudes and policy preferences among US whites, the ethnoracial group most likely to support Trump, at the beginning of his administration? Analyses of two waves of nationally representative US panel survey data for whites demonstrate that voting for Trump, consuming conservative news, being evangelical, and having a stronger white racial identity were linked with more exclusionary abstract immigration attitudes and/or support for one more Trump-era policies: the US-Mexico wall, the Travel Ban targeting majority-Muslim countries, and deportations of unauthorised immigrants. Together, our results emphasise the value of attending to multiple aspects of the national sociopolitical context, considering diverse potential sources that amplify immigration threat, and jointly examining abstract immigration attitudes and specific policy preferences of varying salience.

Indigenous Leadership, Anthropology and Intercultural Communication for COVID-19 Response in the Rio Negro Indigenous Territory, Brazilian Amazonia

Around the world, Indigenous groups have been among the communities most severely affected by COVID-19, and the ability of health systems and social policy responses to support Indigenous responses to the pandemic has been affected by challenges of intercultural communication, sometimes compounded by racist and exclusionary social and political attitudes. The Brazilian Amazon has been a particularly extreme case. This article reflects on the experience of a group of Indigenous leaders and non-Indigenous anthropologists working to promote intercultural approaches to epidemic response in the Rio Negro region of Northwestern Amazonia. It brings together findings from in-person fieldwork on Indigenous responses to infectious disease outbreaks that affected the region before the COVID-19 pandemic and from remote research on COVID-19 response conducted in 2020 and 2021.

Can Rights Discourse Diminish Support for Displaced Persons?

Human rights discourse has become central to the global debates about treatment of and solutions for refugees and displaced persons. Following the expansion of rights-oriented terminology generally, advocates for displacees have increasingly framed their arguments in human rights terms. Many believe that human rights discourse can help mobilize humanitarian solutions for people fleeing violence and persecution. However, we argue that the backlash against human rights institutions and organizations within some communities may render this strategy ineffective and even reinforce exclusionary attitudes among host communities. Based on socio-legal analysis of the refugee label and human rights discourse within Israeli society, we demonstrate how the strategic use of this terminology by pro-refugee NGOs portrays displacees as a security and identity threat to local communities. We suggest alternative framings that might better achieve advocates’ goal of protection.

Are Immigrants Scapegoats? The Reciprocal Relationships Between Subjective Well-Being, Political Distrust, and Anti-immigrant Attitudes in Young Adulthood.

This study examined the impact of native youth's subjective well-being on exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants, seeking to understand the relationship between subjective well-being, political distrust, and anti-immigrant attitudes over time. Using longitudinal data, we followed three cohorts of native young adults (N = 1352; Mage = 22.72, SD = 3.1) in Sweden over a period of 2years. The results showed that subjective well-being did not predict an increase in anti-immigrant attitudes among native youth, but anti-immigrant attitudes had a significant impact on subjective well-being. The data also found bidirectional and mutually reinforcing relationships between subjective well-being and political distrust, and between political distrust and anti-immigrant attitudes. These results highlight that improving young adults' subjective well-being represents an important basis for preventing the development of political distrust, which in turn could reduce native youth's susceptibility to adopt hostile attitudes toward immigrants.

Making distance from our displacement: A cross-section of the academic life of displaced scholars from Turkey working on displacement in Germany

The article interrogates the different ways in which exiled researchers, who have migrated from the field of uncertainty created by the authoritarian regime to the field of precariousness created by extensive marketization, address the issue of displacement in these two different fields of uncertainty. The first part of the article will elucidate how displacement turns into a transformative experience of loss, which is the starting point and direction of movement. In the second part, the tensions in the processes of exiled researchers seeking scholarship and writing in order to continue their careers through problematising the displacement that they themselves now experience. Following section aims thematising by an insider's look at their efforts to overcome marginalising or exclusionary attitudes that emerge through internalized patterns about the experience of being exiled and displacement, and to resettle. In short, how exiled academics' own experiences are reflected in their academic production and professions on the axes of gender and precarity can be summarized as the problematic on which the article proceeds. I can list the methodological resource of findings to be reached in this study as follows. I will draw on findings from my completed although yet unpublished research on the loss of status of the first highly educated refugees. Secondly, for this study, I will conduct a small ethnographic field study and incorporate the narratives of colleagues with similar experiences into the analysis. Thirdly, I will try to proceed with an auto-ethnographic method, with my own experiences. In this respect, data filtered from ethnographic field research, as well as an autoethnographic method, will enrich the article. Thus, in the article, as an academic in exile, I will consider a series of proposals regarding academic work facilities/spaces before and after being displaced. Moreover, my position as an author/researcher and my relationship to the profession, when and where I experienced the loss, and the relearned life/language will constitute the initial themes and methodological discussion of the article. In this context, the loss created by the experience of temporariness and insecurity becomes an essential area of discussion. In the article, the claim that the experience of loss is not post-migration, but pre-migration will be grounded first. Secondly, the lost conceptualization will be put into place. Finally, the possibilities of transition from insecurity due to the authoritarianism of the state I will discuss to the insecurity experienced due to market dominance in the academic system that needs to be adjusted after migration.