Love thy neighbour? Exploring prejudice against ethnic minority groups in a divided society: the case of Northern Ireland

Abstract

Northern Ireland has seen a rise in racially motivated crimes and incidents reported to police in recent years and, although this has been accompanied by intensified media coverage, this phenomenon has been the subject of relatively little research. The purpose of this study is to evaluate empirically three theories that have been proposed to explain prejudice towards ethnic minorities in Northern Ireland; economic self-interest, social contact, and 'sectarianism as racism'. Using the 2013 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, which contains new questions on contact with ethnic minorities, this study looks at attitudes towards Eastern Europeans, Muslims and a third category of 'other ethnic groups'. Results from multivariate linear regression provide evidence for all three theories but also show that the strength and significance of predictive variables for prejudice vary across the minority groups. The findings that there are different motivations for prejudice towards different groups can inform policies to tackle racism in Northern Ireland.

Is racism the new sectarianism? Negativity towards immigrants and ethnic minorities in Northern Ireland from 2004 to 2015

“…This finding indicates that when it comes to the impact of sectarianism on attitudes towards other minorities, Northern Ireland is indeed still a special case. Consistent with other research and with findings on other countries (McLaren 2003;Hayes and Dowds 2006;Hewstone et al 2006;Tam et al 2007;Frølund Thomsen 2012;McKee 2015), we found that regular contact (at least once a week) with minorities makes individuals less likely to endorse negative attitudes towards them. The findings support contact theory (Pettigrew 1998;Brown and Hewstone 2005;Tam et al 2009).…”

“…This concurs with researchers who found negativity towards ethnic minorities to be predominantly a phenomenon of the urban male Protestant working-class (Hewstone et al 2006;McVeigh and Rolston 2007;Tam et al 2007;Knox 2011;McKee 2015).…”

“…In the wake of the Brexit vote in the UK and Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016, both of which were to a large extent driven by anti-immigrant sentiment, group threat theory has gained in salience. Empirical cross-national comparisons (McLaren 2003;Schneider 2007;Borgonovi 2012, Doebler 2014 and case studies from the UK (Ford 2008;Cutts, Ford, and Goodwin 2011), the Netherlands (Coenders and Scheepers 2003;Billiet and De Witte 2008;Van Assche et al 2014), Germany (Wagner, Christ, and Pettigrew 2008) and Northern Ireland (Hayes and Dowds 2006;McVeigh and Rolston 2007;McKee 2015) confirmed that lower educational achievement and lower socio-economic status are associated with an increased likelihood of perceiving immigrants and ethnic minorities as a threat. Particularly in the case of Northern Ireland, group threat theory is a plausible candidate for explaining anti-immigrant negativity, since the history of sectarian hostility was theorized by several scholars as based on economic and power struggles between the two (Protestant vs. Catholic) ethnic/religious groups (Brewer 1992;Anderson and Shuttleworth 1998;McVeigh and Rolston 2007;Brewer 2015).…”

“…A number of studies found evidence to support this theory both at the level of individual contacts and the neighbourhood level (Schmid et al 2014;Kaufmann and Harris 2015). A negative link between increased contact and negativity towards ethnic minorities was found in Northern Ireland (Hayes and Dowds 2006;McKee 2015), Scandinavia and other European countries (McLaren 2003;Frølund Thomsen 2012;Schmid et al 2014).…”

“…Northern Ireland's history of sectarian conflict around national and religious identities (as either Protestant -British or Catholic Irish) makes the country a special case in Europe. Hence, much of the literature has linked Northern Ireland's high rates of racially motivated hate crimes and the strong prevalence of negative attitudes towards ethnic minorities to the region's sectarian past (Moore 1972;McVeigh and Rolston 2007;Knox 2011;Savaric 2014;McKee 2015;McVeigh 2015). This view has also been the predominant public discourse, e.g.…”