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When ethnic prejudice is political: an experiment in beliefs and hostility toward immigrant out-groups in Italy

Part of: IPSR-RISP Migration collection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2019

Mauro Barisione Open the ORCID record for Mauro Barisione [Opens in a new window]
Mauro Barisione*
Affiliation:
University of Milan, Milan, Italy
*
Corresponding author. Email: mauro.barisione@unimi.it
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Abstract

When the immigration issue has been strongly politicized, prejudice toward minority out-groups can be profoundly imbued with politics, to the point that citizen responses to partisan cues about immigrants tend to operate on the basis of a ‘political sympathy/antipathy bias’. This article demonstrates that there is a direct causal relation between the nature (i.e. contents and sources) of political communication over immigrants and voters' responses. Drawing on an experimental design based on ITANES (Italian National Election Studies) 2018 election survey data, it isolates the effect that the voters' ideology and party alignments, as well as the partisan source of a message, exert on manifestations of ethnic prejudice, operationalized as the refusal to accept a plausibile and counter-stereotypical statement about immigrants. It concludes that even a mere symbolic change in communication by those party actors (i.e. the League) which ‘own’ the issue would suffice to attenuate hostility toward out-groups, to the extent that it results from sustained partisan rhetoric and mobilization.

Keywords

DiscourseimmigrationItalypoliticizationvoting behavior
Type
Research Article
Information
Italian Political Science Review / Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , July 2020 , pp. 213 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © Società Italiana di Scienza Politica 2019

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Footnotes

1

Data Science Research Center (DSRC) and Public Opinion and Media Lab (POMLAB), Università degli Studi di Milano.

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