Hate crime increases with minoritized group rank

Mina Cikara, Vasiliki Fouka and Marco Tabellini

No 2z3kw, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: People are on the move in unprecedented numbers across the globe. How does migration affect local intergroup dynamics? In contrast to accounts that emphasize stereotypical features of groups as determinants of their treatment, we propose the social group reference dependence hypothesis: violence and negative attitudes toward each minoritized group will depend on the number and size of other minoritized groups in a community. Specifically, as groups increase in rank in their relative size (e.g., to largest minority within a community), discriminatory behavior and attitudes toward them should increase accordingly. We test this hypothesis across U.S. counties between 1990 and 2010. Consistent with this prediction we find that, as Black, Hispanic/Latinx, Asian, and Arab populations increase in rank relative to one another, they become more likely to be targeted with hate crimes and more negative attitudes. The rank effect holds above and beyond group size/proportion, growth rate, and a number of other alternative explanations. This framework makes novel predictions about how demographic shifts may affect coalitional structures in the coming years and helps explain previous findings in the literature. More broadly, our results complement the existing literature by indicating that attitudes and behaviors toward social categories are not fixed or driven only by features associated with those groups, such as stereotypes.

Date: 2020-12-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/5fdaad350694b7049ef3a124/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:2z3kw

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/2z3kw

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().