The economic limits of empathy? Analysing variation in the attitudes of oppressed minority groups towards refugees

Bibliographic Data

ID7843797
AuthorsOguzhan Turkoglu (0000-0002-0598-688X, Hertie School, corresponding author), Miceal Canavan (0000-0002-5233-7823, Trinity College Dublin), Ahmet Içduygu (0000-0002-8145-5888, Koç University)
Year2023
Volume49
Issue19
Pages4850-4869
Publication date2023-11-26
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Community (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0047-9586 • E-ISSN: 1469-9451
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1369183x.2022.2085081
OpenAlexW4389214158
LanguageEN
Citations received11
References cited39

How do group characteristics differentially moderate attitudes towards refugees on humanitarian, sociocultural, and economic issues? Building on recent research on group empathy and perspective-taking, we argue that oppressed minority groups will display more positive attitudes towards refugees than dominant majority groups due to empathy triggered by a shared experience of oppression. However, there are economic limits of empathy. Specifically, the empathetic response will not extend to attitudes regarding the economic impact of refugees due to the perceived zero-sum nature of economic competition. Analysis of granular data in Turkey supports the argument, with Kurds (i.e. oppressed group) displaying more positive attitudes on sociocultural and humanitarian issues but not economic. The generalisability of this argument is underscored by a similar analysis of European Social Survey data from 37 countries. The results highlight the importance of group characteristics in understanding attitudes towards refugees, particularly how views vary across groups and topics.KEYWORDS: RefugeesattitudesminorityTurkeyKurds Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1 It is important to note that in countries that host the most refugees the majority of refugees live amongst the general population rather than in camps (UNHCR Citation2020b).2 It is important to note that this is a simplification and there are important factors within each of these categories and additional areas which can be added.3 Some evidence for this exists in previous studies but has received limited attention. See, for example, a study on the attitudes of Jordanians towards Syrian refugees. Their results suggest that Jordanians of Palestinian descent have more positive attitudes towards Syrian refugees across a range of indicators than the rest of the Jordanian public, however, this is not fully explored or explained (Alrababa'h et al. Citation2021).4 For studies using Konda surveys, please see https://konda.com.tr/en/publications/.5 In classifying items as egocentric economic and sociotropic economic, we relied on Bansak, Hainmueller, and Hangartner (Citation2016). While sociotropic economic evaluations are related to the effects of migrants on the country as a whole, egocentric economic evaluations are related to the effects of migrants on personal economic situation. We classified the item about obtaining a residency permit as sociotropic rather than egocentric because having a residency permit leads to certain legal entitlements (e.g. welfare, healthcare etc.), which are provided by the government and paid by taxes. Therefore, individuals obtaining residency permit can be considered as a possible cost to the whole country. However, we classified obtaining a work permit as egocentric economic because new individuals entering the labour market can be considered as a possible cost to individual economic well-being through labour market competition.6 There is generally a limited number of questions on attitudes towards refugees in general survey programmes, which makes it challenging to test our argument. As a robustness check and to generalise the results, below we offer evidence from the European Social Survey.7 In the survey, there are other statements and questions that we do not use in this study because they are not relevant to our argument (e.g. ‘when the war is over, Syrian refugees will go back to their country’). There are also questions about whether respondents would like to live in the same city, neighbourhood, apartment, and house with Syrians. We argue that these questions are related to intergroup relations rather than attitudes towards refugees. Although the results for these variables support our argument, we preferred not to present them as they are not directly relevant to our study.8 Since the last dependent variable is binary, we used logistic regression, but using OLS, we also obtained similar results that support our argument.9 Full regression results are reported in the Appendix Tables A2 and A3.10 Results are reported in the Appendix Table A6 and A7.11 In this study, short regression is defined as Attitudei=β1Kurdishi+δt+εi. We included δt in the short regression because excluding it leads to very optimistic results for our argument because the difference between R~ and R ̇ gets larger. As expected, when we excluded δt from the short regression, results still support our argument.12 When we increase δ (i.e. assuming the unobservables can explain variation in the dependent variable more than the observables), results are still supportive of our argument.13 In the survey, respondents were asked whether they agree with the statement ‘I believe that we are culturally similar to Syrians’ and similar to other statements, the answer can range from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree). To operationalise cultural similarity, we use this variable.14 When we include these variables in the second stage, the results are still supportive of our argument.15 The results are reported in the Appendix Figure A1.16 For country and round information, please see the Appendix Figure A2.17 The original statement is ‘most refugee applicants not in real fear of persecution own countries’. To make the interpretation easier, we recoded the statement so that higher values denote positive attitudes and presented the positive statement.18 We controlled for gender, age, marital status, education level, employment, income, parents' education, and religious denomination

Criminology · Empathy · Oppression · Political science · Politics · Population · Refugee · Sociocultural evolution · Sociology · Demography · Gender Studies · Law · Medicine · Migration, Health and Trauma · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Psychology · Social and Intergroup Psychology · Social Psychology

Tools

Open DOI