Experimental Research About Attitudes Toward Pluralism and Discrimination

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel offers new pathways for comparative research about attitudes towards pluralism and discrimination in six countries. The recent global resurgence of far-right populism and the popular backlash against it have returned to the fore the tension between racism and xenophobia and pluralism in the United States and worldwide. The global scope of these trends has demonstrated the importance of placing into comparative perspective the popular embrace of both pluralism and its opposite in the United States. In recent decades, political scientists have made significant progress in applying experimental methods to the study of political attitudes and intergroup relations in American politics. Advancing research about attitudes towards discrimination, pluralism, and justice, however, requires that scholars place these US-based findings in conversation with research about these topics in other political contexts.

The junior and senior scholars on this panel--ranging from PhD candidates to tenured faculty--bridge the fields of American Politics, Comparative Politics, and International Relations by analyzing the effects of novel historical frames, educational interventions, and museum visits on attitudes towards minoritized groups, foreign-born citizens, and efforts to reconcile and educate societies affected by past violence. Empirically, the papers span six countries--the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Colombia, and Northern Ireland--to show how diverse contexts share common challenges of fostering pluralism and resisting discrimination. In demonstrating the potential applications of these treatments through a comparative lens, the papers offer important empirical, normative, and practical implications for future work about pluralism and discrimination.

Sub Unit

• Division 32: Race, Ethnicity, and Politics

Cosponsor

• Division 51: Experimental Research

Individual Presentations

• Political Violence and Public Attitudes Toward Justice - Jamil Shatema Scott, Georgetown University; Daniel Solomon, Georgetown University; Kelebogile Zvobgo, College of William & Mary

• What Do Canadian Teens Know About the Holocaust and Antisemitism? - Alexis Monique Lerner, Western University

• Memories in Conflict: Persuasion in Transitional Justice Museums - Elsa Voytas, Princeton University; Laia Balcells, Georgetown University

• Can Immigrants Be Good Citizens? A Conjoint Experiment in Three Democracies - Sara Wallace Goodman, University of California, Irvine

Chair

• John Holbein University of Virginia

Discussant

• Hakeem Jerome Jefferson Stanford University