Theory: Attitudes, Discrimination, and Context

Discrimination describes an unfavourable treatment of a member of a (minority) group based on an irrelevant criterion. For instance, for property owners, the skin colour or the name of a prospective tenant as such does not affect the likelihood of the tenant paying rent or taking care of the property. Landlords or employers who discriminate against members of minority groups may not pick the ideal tenant or employee, which in the long term should put them at an economic disadvantage compared to those who do not discriminate. In this sense, the persistence of discrimination is puzzling to economists, in addition to being unjust (Blank, 2005).

While Becker (1957) has introduced the by now classic distinction between taste-based and statistical discrimination to bring discriminatory behaviour into an economist framework, a detailed understanding of discriminatory behaviour remains elusive because we typically cannot observe discrimination directly or cannot differentiate different reasons for discrimination when we can observe it. In particular, we know little how attitudes relate to discrimination (Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2014).

Researchers on discrimination typically assume intuitively that discriminatory behaviour requires negative attitudes to minorities: attitudes as a necessary condition for behaviour. Since the classic study by LaPiere (1934), however, the extent of this association between attitudes and behaviour remains an empirical puzzle – attitudes are not a sufficient condition. With strong norms against discrimination affecting the measurement of relevant attitudes, establishing a relationship between attitudes and behaviour is challenging (Blank et al., 2004; Blinder, Ford, & Ivarsflaten, 2013;

Kunstman, Plant, Zielaskowski, & LaCosse, 2013). Psychologists in the lab suggest that implicit attitudes may relate more closely to discriminatory behaviour than explicitly stated attitudes (Rooth, 2010), but moving these findings into the field has proved difficult. Earlier research directly surveyed people (LaPiere, 1934; Pager & Quillian, 2005), while some recent work combines results of correspondence tests with aggregated attitudes in different regions (Carlsson & Eriksson, 2017; Carlsson &

Rooth, 2012). Discriminatory behaviour does not need to be conscious, which is why

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recent studies increasingly draw on field experiments (Butler & Broockman, 2011;

Jackson & Cox, 2013).

An extensive literature on attitudes to immigrants has established that many factors influence these attitudes. Negative attitudes may stem from unwanted competition in the labour market (Kunovich, 2013; Pecoraro & Ruedin, 2019), worries over tax burdens if immigrants draw on social benefits (Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2014), from racial prejudice (Pettigrew, 2016), or individual personality or genetic influences (Gallego & Pardos-Prado, 2014; Hatemi & McDermott, 2016; Pettigrew, 2016). While early contributions have looked at authoritarianism, recent research draws on more established frameworks of personality (Levin & Sidanius, 1999; Schwartz, 2012). In a quest to move towards behavioural responses, studies have started to use experimental designs (Bansak, Hainmueller, & Hangartner, 2016; Butler & Broockman, 2011; Chen, Pan, & Xu, 2016; Cutts, Ford, & Goodwin, 2011; Forrest & Dunn, 2010;

Gaikwad & Nellis, 2016; Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2015; Hemker & Rink, 2017; Malhotra, Margalit, & Mo, 2013; Pérez, 2015; Reibel, 2000). While this is laudable, these studies have tended to focus on decisions that are not relevant to people’s everyday life, like deciding whom to naturalize or whether to send a message to a politician.

A different strand of the literature explores how attitudes to immigrants and ethnic minority groups are influenced by external shocks and context more generally.

The influence of context can be established in priming experiments that study the impact of media portrayal on attitudes. For instance, liberal and conservative participants in lab experiments may react differently to media messages on immigration (Lahav & Courtemanche, 2012). Out of the lab, the influence of context on attitudes has been demonstrated using the example of recent refugee flows into Europe. Hangartner, Dinas, Marbach, Matakos, and Xefteris (2018) have studied the impact of local refugee flows on Greek islands to demonstrate that the presence of a large number of refugees who did not constitute economic competition because they moved on to the Greek mainland can influence attitudes (see also Getmansky, Sınmazdemir, & Zeitzoff, 2018). Enos (2016) demonstrated the importance of context by examining how the demolition of public housing – and with that the removal of many Black neighbours – affected racial attitudes in the US. From a quite different angle Pardos‑Prado and Xena (2019) show that differences in labour-market policies can shape attitudes: in this case, possible competition with immigrants plays a role.

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Particularly from studies on party politics we have the argument that there is something distinctively xenophobic among radical right-wing parties (Mudde &

Kaltwasser, 2012). In this reading, negative policies against immigrants and immigration differ from merely being conservative. Conservatism refers to preferences of the status quo, but also a view that naturally there exist different groups and a hierarchy. Xenophobic positions may draw on such views, but regard foreigners and their potential influence as negative. Put differently, conceptually xenophobic positions can be differentiated from conservative positions. With a view on discrimination, however, both conservative and xenophobic contexts are conducive to more discrimination. Individuals with xenophobic attitudes may feel encouraged to discriminate because their behaviour may be implicitly sanctioned. Empirically, however, the picture is more complicated. On the one hand we have reports of more negative attitudes in more conservative contexts (Sarrasin et al., 2012), on the other hand views at the right end of the political spectrum seem to mix up conservatism and xenophobia (Daenekindt, de Koster, & van der Waal, 2017). A review by Wilkes, Guppy, and Farris (2008) casts doubt, whether conservatism is really necessary for xenophobia to develop: While some studies find a clear association between conservative position and anti-immigrant positions, others do not.

Here we draw on results from referendums and popular initiatives to differentiate xenophobic from conservative positions at the level of municipalities. By linking these to a national correspondence test on the housing market, we can establish a link between attitudes and behaviour in a situation that is familiar and relevant to most members of the public. We overcome limits of survey research that can measure stated attitudes (conservatism, xenophobia), but not real-life discrimination, and pure experiments that capture discrimination without being able to link it to attitudes at a reasonably small unit of analysis. Drawing on two recent meta studies on discrimination in the housing market (Auspurg et al., 2018; Flage, 2018), our baseline expectation is that queries sent from prospective tenants with foreign-sounding names receive fewer responses than queries from people with ‘native’ names. We also expect more discrimination for people with non-Western names. With a focus on context, we can outline two expectations:

Expectation 1: The call-back rate is lower for people with foreign-sounding names (i.e.

more discrimination) in more xenophobic municipalities

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Expectation 2: The call-back rate is lower for people with foreign-sounding names (i.e.

more discrimination) in more conservative municipalities.

Since xenophobic and conservative attitudes vary to some extent, we can test the assumption that there is something distinctive about xenophobic attitudes.

Expectation 3: Once we account for conservative attitudes, discrimination in more xenophobic municipalities is reduced.

In the context of a regression analysis, these expectations mean that we expect negative coefficients for the probability to be contacted by the landlord for conservatism and xenophobic attitudes at the municipal level. Further, we expect a negative effect of xenophobia, even after accounting for conservatism.