The Effects of Immigrant Population Size, Unemployment, and Individual Characteristics on Voting for the Vlaams Blok in Flanders 1991-1999

Ethnic Categorization: The Role of Epistemic Motivation, Prejudice, and Perceived Threat

“…The index of accuracy of categorization was rather low, and this result suggested that our participants did not have an increased sensitivity to traits associated with Albanian and Moroccan faces. Several authors have suggested that group size implies category salience and that more sizeable groups could be perceived as more threatening (e.g., Quillian, 1995Quillian, , 2006Rink et al, 2008). On the basis of these results, as well as ours, we argue that in real life the tendency to overclassify immigrants in groups believed=estimated to be the largest may render that category even more salient, inflate the perceived group size, reinforce the conviction that there are too many immigrants of that certain group, and consequently exacerbate feelings of group threat and prejudice.…”

“…Recent studies reveal that some individual variables such as social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism predict violent hostility toward immigrants only under experimentally manipulated conditions of relevant threats (Guimond, de Oliveira, Kamiesjki, & Sidanius, 2010;Thomsen, Green, & Sidanius, 2008). Some authors suggest that perceived threat could be related to perceptions of the size and composition of the immigrant population (Quillian, 1995(Quillian, , 2006Rink, Phalet, & Swyngedouw, 2008;Schneider, 2008). Several studies document ''innumeracy'' with regards to demographic estimates of minority populations in Western countries, with the tendency to overestimate the size of minority populations (Bonifazi, 1992;Freeman, 1995;Kosic, 2002;Sigelman & Niemi, 2001;Theiss-Morse, 2003).…”

Xenophobic societal attitudes in a “new” South Africanism: Governance of public perceptions, national identities and citizenship

“…A rudimentary tenet of the threat theory states that intergroup tensions and conflicts intensify with contact that exposes in-groups and out-groups to competition for scarce resources (Hjerm, 2009;Kopstein & Wittenberg, 2009;Rink, Phalet & Swyngedouw, 2009;Jolly & DiGiusto, 2014). Generally, societal attitudes and prejudice against the out-group are driven primarily through collective threat perceptions rather than egocentric individual contact or sociotropic "objective personal economic circumstances" (Burns & Gimpel, 2000;Hopkins, 2010;Jolly & DiGiusto, 2014).…”

“…Strong perception of collective threat can on its own precipitate resentment, animosities, antagonism and abusive violence. From the threat theory's perspective, the size of the out-group can easily precipitate intensive collective threat in the in-group with the attendant prejudices and antagonism against immigrants (Jennings, 2009;Rink et al, 2009;Ha, 2010;Hopkins, 2010Hopkins, , 2011Jolly & DiGiusto, 2014). As Hjerm (2009) put it, antipathy against the out-group intensifies with the increase in the size of the immigrant population, which is directly correlated with the ingroup perceived collective threat.…”

Immigration and the vote for the left: Measuring the effect of ethnic diversity on electoral outcomes at the district level

“…A significant proportion of these works focus on the rise and the differential success of emerging extreme right-wing and of populist right-wing parties in Western countries and, more recently, in the newer Eastern European democracies ( Van der Brug and Fennema, 2009). Case studies, analysis of longitudinal data, and comparative analyses of European countries all link the electoral success of extreme right-wing parties to immigrant population size (Golder, 2003;Rink et al, 2009). Roughly, four families of arguments summarize the explanations given in the literature to the success of anti-immigrant parties: 1) socio-structural models of voting that stress the fact that voters of these parties feel threatened by immigrants by competing with them in either the labor market or welfare systems (Lubbers and Scheepers, 2000); 2) models of voting that see support for anti-immigration parties as an expression of discontent against traditional parties or anti-political sentiments (Swyngedouw, 2001), eventually headed by charismatic leaders (Lubbers et al, 2002); 3) institutional explanations of the electoral success of extreme right-wing parties, where electoral support is conditional on the existence of particular combinations of immigration policies and electoral systems ( Van der Brug and Fennema, 2005); 4) explanations of the vote of anti-immigrant and extreme right-wing in terms of the right-left dimension and as motivated by the policy preferences of rational voters (Van der Brug et al, 2000).…”