Abstract
This paper examines the patterns of ethnic intolerance in European societies based on data from the 1999/2000 wave of the European Values Survey. We analyze the differences in intolerance targeted toward Muslims, Jews, immigrants, Gypsies, and persons of different race, using modernisation theory and “competition for scarce resource” theories as our point of departure. Furthermore, we focus on the differences in the levels of intolerance in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Turkey. The present paper builds on previous empirical research, especially findings of recent multilevel analyses. Our larger and more extensive data material enables us to introduce two important improvements in this line of research. Theoretically, we are able to test if there are differences in the patterns of intolerance targeted toward specific minority groups. Methodologically, the number of countries in our data material is much larger, allowing us to apply multilevel models in a more statistically appropriate setting. Our results show that Gypsies stand out as an ethnic group particularly exposed to intolerance. The level of intolerance is lowest in Western Europe and highest in Turkey. In addition, the level of intolerance against Jews is particularly high in Turkey.
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Notes
There is a well-developed body of research on ethnic prejudice in psychology, like, for example, social identity theory’s emphasis on the ingroup/outgroup dynamic regarding how group identities are formed. However, we focus on theoretical approaches commonly used in sociology and political science.
There is vast literature on intolerance and prejudice in social sciences and the number of potentially useful theoretical approaches is very large. In addition to the two approaches we focus on, one could also use Social Identity Theory (Tajfel 1981, 1982), Authoritarian Personality approach (Adorno et al. 1950), Symbolic Politics approach (Sears et al. 1979), etc.
Data from the European Values Study were made available from the Norwegian Social Science Data Services.
The number of respondents from each country is set to approximately 1,246 in order to keep the total number of (virtual) cases unchanged after the weighting,
For more details, see Rasbash et al. (2003: 111).
The Bogardus Social Distance Scale was created by Emory S. Bogardus in order to measure people’s willingness to participate in social contacts with members of diverse social groups.
One possibility is to create an additive scale of these five dummy variables. The problem is that such a variable can only be considered as being measured on ordinal level of measurement. Both the low number of possible values and substantial difficulties in claiming the intervals being metric make it difficult to use statistical techniques implying higher level of measurement
Sometimes, the explanations based on social psychology are offered, mostly dealing with personality traits. We are not going to pursue such theoretical approaches here.
Due to the categorical nature of the variable that was used as a starting point for dummy coding (v320), the individuals coded as having income in lowest quartile actually occupy the lowest 21.8% of the income distribution.
It is at least partly plausible to assume agricultural workers to be less influenced by the process of modernisation than most of the other occupational categories. Therefore, we expect a positive effect on intolerance in this case.
For an overview of research on association between ethnic prejudice and religiosity, see Hunsberger (1995).
There is large number of measures of different aspects of religiosity employed in research of ethnic prejudice in social psychology. Unfortunately, there is little agreement about the appropriate measures and there are numerous examples of inconsistent and contradictory research results (Laythe et al. 2002).
This can partly be a result of the formulation of the questions in the questionnaire. The respondents were provided with a list of the groups of people and they had to actively point out the ones they thought were undesirable as neighbours.
The numbers of East and West European countries in the sample are not equal (18 WE countries and 13 EE countries).
Source: CIA “The World Factbook 2003”
A closer inspection of the data leaves us with the impression of undersampling of Muslims in several West European countries, probably due to non-response problems. For example, only one of the 1615 French respondents is a Muslim, while estimated 7% of the population is Muslim.
For the country-level variables, we are generalizing within stochastic model theory, that is, from the observation made, to the process or mechanism that brings about the actual data.
The effects of Eastern Europe compared to Western Europe in the models with intolerance against Gypsies and Jews as dependent variables are not statistically significant, but this might be caused by methodological problems. The standard errors of the coefficient in these two models are almost double as large as the corresponding standard errors in the other two models. Substantively, the effects of the variable are of similar size in all four models.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Jon S. E. Jakobsen for graphical assistance and the anonymous referees who have contributed with their thorough comments and useful suggestions.
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Strabac, Z., Listhaug, O. & Jakobsen, T.G. Patterns of Ethnic Intolerance in Europe. Int. Migration & Integration 13, 459–479 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-011-0222-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-011-0222-4