The role of history and family experience in shaping xenophobic attitudes

• In Event: Quest for Legitimacy: Understanding Threat, Fear, and Political Exclusion

Abstract

How does emigration or forced relocation, experienced in the past by an individual, her ancestors or her home town, affect her present-day attitudes towards immigrants and asylum seekers? Xenophobic sentiment is on the rise in many western countries facing large immigrant and refugee inflows, and there is increasing agreement that such sentiment seems to be motivated more by cultural than by economic factors (Sniderman, Hagendoorn and Prior, 2004; Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2014). And yet, the demographic profile of the “rooted” native population in both the US and Europe has itself to a large extent been shaped by immigration or forced relocation in the 20th century or earlier. Germany, to name as an example one of the countries that many Syrian refugees view as their terminal destination, is largely composed of the descendants of ethnic Germans who were expelled from Eastern European countries after the Second World War. How does this historical experience of forced relocation affect modern-day views of refugees from Syria? Do such past events increase or decrease empathy towards out-groups?

We attempt to answer these questions in the context of Greece, a country that serves as an entry port to Europe for a large number of refugees today—with almost 400,000 new asylum seekers arriving in the country between May 2015 and September 2015 (UNHCR 2016)—and whose present-day population composition was also significantly determined by a population exchange in the early 20th century. In 1923, after the defeat of the Greek army in the Greco-Turkish war of 1919–1922, Greece and the newly formed Republic of Turkey signed an international treaty agreeing to a compulsory exchange of populations. The exchange was carried out on the basis of religion, with approximately 1.5 million Orthodox Christians – both Greek and Turkish speakers – expelled from Turkey and 500.000 Muslims expelled from Greece. The inflow of refugees from Turkey amounted to almost 25% of Greece’s then population of 5 millions. Newly settled refugees faced adverse economic and social conditions in the first years of their settlement in Greece, and were often treated with mistrust and outright discrimination by the natives. We try to assess the extent to which the socialization or personal memory of such experiences shape attitudes towards current out-groups with similar characteristics. In particular, we ask whether individuals from refugee families or those living in historical refugee settlements hold more or less tolerant attitudes towards Syrian refugees, and whether those attitudes are responsive to an increase in the salience of the historical experience of forced relocation from Turkey.

We use detailed historical census data to identify the exposure of towns to early 20th century refugee inflows and conduct a survey in a matched sample of towns with and without refugee past. Our survey collects attitudinal and behavioral data on views towards Syrian refugees, together with detailed demographics that allow us to trace an individual’s refugee past to the generation of the grandparents. We combine systematic comparisons of attitudes at the individual and town level, and towards refugees and other out-groups, with experimental manipulations that increase the salience of the historical experience of forced relocation. Our research design pits against each other two alternative hypotheses regarding the effects of past experience on attitudes: does one’s own past facilitate perspective taking (Lamm et al. 2007) and increase empathy towards out-groups undergoing similar experiences? Or does the similarity of negative experiences lead to victimhood competition (Bar-Tal and Halperin, 2013) and increased hostility? We exploit multiple sources of variation to identify average effects and conduct a detailed heterogeneity analysis to investigate the mechanisms behind observed reactions.

Authors

• Elias Dinas, University of Oxford

• Vasiliki Fouka, Stanford University