Tag: protest

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Problems measuring “other” in gender identity questions, and a possible solution

When asking questions about gender identity in surveys in Switzerland, I often faced the problem that a tiny fraction of respondents did not answer the question seriously. Normally, we can live with this, but it’s a real hindrance when trying to capture relatively small sections of the population.

Here’s a typical case from Switzerland in 2015:

Male (blue), female (red), other (green)

We offered “female”, “male”, and “other” as response categories with the option to specify which “other” identity applies. If we go by estimates elsewhere, we should expect between 0.1% and 2% of the respondents picking “other”. At first sight, we seem to be at the lower end, but there’s likely serious under-reporting because more than half of these “other” responses are not referring to other gender identities. We get responses like “cat”, or “there are only two genders” — definitely not on the useful side of open questions (beyond noting that some people are probably frustrated about the fact that we do talk about non-binary identities, I guess).

Offering more choices for gender identity seems to discourage nonsense and protest answers, leaving us with a better measure of non-binary gender identity

I’ve had this in several surveys, but recently we tried something else: we offered more choice! Yes, rather than “female”, “male”, and “other” we spelled out a few of the “other” category: “female”, “male”, “non-binary”, “transgender female”, “transgender male”, “other”. From a conventional survey design point of view, this was bordering the ridiculous because we only expected some 500 respondents in this survey, which would yield between 1 and 10 respondents in those categories combined (going by existing estimates). We’re still at the lower end of this range, but we had none of these nonsense and protest answers.

Given that we’ve run an almost identical survey just months earlier with the three category format (“female”, “male”, “other”) and had more than half of the “other” answers that did not refer to gender identity, we might be onto a solution…

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(Last) Call for Papers: The impact of Black Lives Matter and Covid-19 on Public Attitudes to Immigrants

Deadline 1 February 2021 — Call for Papers: The impact of Black Lives Matter and Covid-19 on Public Attitudes to Immigrants
ECPR General Conference, 31 August- 3 September 2021, University of Innsbruck

When it comes to attitudes to immigrants and their rights, 2020 has seen two major events: the Black Lives Matter protests in the US triggered by the killing of George Floyd, and the global Covid-19 pandemic. In this panel, we seek innovative empirical contributions that study how these events affected social norms and in turn affected attitudes to immigrants or related discrimination. On the one hand, the pandemic a priori heightens distinctions between in-groups and out-groups, which leads to more negative attitudes. The crisis may further create a fertile ground for xenophobia and nationalist tendencies due to increased feelings of fear, threat, uncertainty, and anxiety, which may result in discriminating behaviour. What is more, scapegoating of immigrants and health-related negative stereotypes may surface during the health crisis. On the other hand, the media coverage of Black Lives Matter increased awareness of structural racism and spread the perspective of racial and ethnic minorities. As a result of this, European respondents may have developed more nuanced attitudes to minority groups, and the salience of the news coverage may have led to extended contact and perspective taking that reduce negative stereotypes and will lead to more positive attitudes. We expect temporal and geographic variation to yield insightful comparisons, while experimental studies can reveal likely mechanisms how these major events affected attitudes and discrimination. We also welcome experimental and observational papers explicitly accounting for the intersectionality of categories of difference, e.g. ethnicity, race, religiosity or gender, in triggering prejudice and discrimination.

Panel chairs: Didier Ruedin (University of Neuchâtel, didier.ruedin@unine.ch), Anita Manatschal (University of Neuchâtel, anita.manatschal@unine.ch)

Conference: https://ecpr.eu/GeneralConference

Submit your abstract (max 250 words) online at: http://neuchatel.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_50YdsmYRd5bwZWB no later than 1 February 2021.

Call as PDF

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Call for Papers: The impact of Black Lives Matter and Covid-19 on Public Attitudes to Immigrants

Call for Papers: The impact of Black Lives Matter and Covid-19 on Public Attitudes to Immigrants
ECPR General Conference, 31 August- 3 September 2021, University of Innsbruck

When it comes to attitudes to immigrants and their rights, 2020 has seen two major events: the Black Lives Matter protests in the US triggered by the killing of George Floyd, and the global Covid-19 pandemic. In this panel, we seek innovative empirical contributions that study how these events affected social norms and in turn affected attitudes to immigrants or related discrimination. On the one hand, the pandemic a priori heightens distinctions between in-groups and out-groups, which leads to more negative attitudes. The crisis may further create a fertile ground for xenophobia and nationalist tendencies due to increased feelings of fear, threat, uncertainty, and anxiety, which may result in discriminating behaviour. What is more, scapegoating of immigrants and health-related negative stereotypes may surface during the health crisis. On the other hand, the media coverage of Black Lives Matter increased awareness of structural racism and spread the perspective of racial and ethnic minorities. As a result of this, European respondents may have developed more nuanced attitudes to minority groups, and the salience of the news coverage may have led to extended contact and perspective taking that reduce negative stereotypes and will lead to more positive attitudes. We expect temporal and geographic variation to yield insightful comparisons, while experimental studies can reveal likely mechanisms how these major events affected attitudes and discrimination. We also welcome experimental and observational papers explicitly accounting for the intersectionality of categories of difference, e.g. ethnicity, race, religiosity or gender, in triggering prejudice and discrimination.

Panel chairs: Didier Ruedin (University of Neuchâtel, didier.ruedin@unine.ch), Anita Manatschal (University of Neuchâtel, anita.manatschal@unine.ch)

Conference: https://ecpr.eu/GeneralConference

Submit your abstract (max 250 words) online at: http://neuchatel.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_50YdsmYRd5bwZWB no later than 1 February 2021.

Call as PDF

Posted on

Call for Papers: The impact of Black Lives Matter and Covid-19 on Public Attitudes to Immigrants

Call for Papers: The impact of Black Lives Matter and Covid-19 on Public Attitudes to Immigrants
ECPR General Conference, 31 August- 3 September 2021, University of Innsbruck

When it comes to attitudes to immigrants and their rights, 2020 has seen two major events: the Black Lives Matter protests in the US triggered by the killing of George Floyd, and the global Covid-19 pandemic. In this panel, we seek innovative empirical contributions that study how these events affected social norms and in turn affected attitudes to immigrants or related discrimination. On the one hand, the pandemic a priori heightens distinctions between in-groups and out-groups, which leads to more negative attitudes. The crisis may further create a fertile ground for xenophobia and nationalist tendencies due to increased feelings of fear, threat, uncertainty, and anxiety, which may result in discriminating behaviour. What is more, scapegoating of immigrants and health-related negative stereotypes may surface during the health crisis. On the other hand, the media coverage of Black Lives Matter increased awareness of structural racism and spread the perspective of racial and ethnic minorities. As a result of this, European respondents may have developed more nuanced attitudes to minority groups, and the salience of the news coverage may have led to extended contact and perspective taking that reduce negative stereotypes and will lead to more positive attitudes. We expect temporal and geographic variation to yield insightful comparisons, while experimental studies can reveal likely mechanisms how these major events affected attitudes and discrimination. We also welcome experimental and observational papers explicitly accounting for the intersectionality of categories of difference, e.g. ethnicity, race, religiosity or gender, in triggering prejudice and discrimination.

Panel chairs: Didier Ruedin (University of Neuchâtel, didier.ruedin@unine.ch), Anita Manatschal (University of Neuchâtel, anita.manatschal@unine.ch)

Conference: https://ecpr.eu/GeneralConference

Submit your abstract (max 250 words) online at: http://neuchatel.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_50YdsmYRd5bwZWB no later than 1 February 2021.

Call as PDF

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Protest Movements in Asylum and Deportation — Out Now

The book of the Taking Sides project is out now as an e-book: “Protest Movements in Asylum and Deportation“. It’s open access, so there’s no reason not to read it!

This comparative project examines protest against deportations in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. In some ways, it is a follow-up to the FP-7 project Support and opposition to Migration (SOM), where we examined the politicization of immigration more widely. The politicization of asylum, and particularly politicization in favour of asylum seekers and against their deportation was not treated much in SOM. Taking Sides includes an extensive media analysis of newspapers in the three countries, alongside many in-depth case studies. My contribution was more on the quantitative analysis of the media study, and in chapter 5 we summarize similarities and differences across the three countries, 1993 to 2013. We show that the frequency of anti-deportation protests has developed differently in the three countries, and outline a shift in the main actors in these protests, and with that a shift in repertoires. There’s a clear uptake in failed asylum seekers (potential deportees) to participate in these protests.

We differentiate between solidarity protest and case-specific protests as different kinds of protests. This is a slightly different vocabulary to what my colleagues Johanna Probst and Dina Bader used in their Social Movement Studies paper which draws heavily on the case studies. Overall we find little evidence that there is a transnational movement orchestrating protests against deportations, with many local protests seemingly taking place independently of each other. While some of these protests are also against deportations more generally, many of them focus entirely on the case at hand. The protest is not against deportations, but against the deportation of a particular asylum seeker who is considered ‘integrated’ and ‘deserving’ to stay.

The book includes chapters that outline the context of the protests: across countries, and across time within these countries, focusing on political institutions or legal changes. One of the chapters asks what makes a successful protest against deportation, pushing it quite hard what can be said with the data at hand. We don’t have a research design that would allow a systematic comparison between successful and unsuccessful cases, but the qualitative case studies offer some useful pointers where more rigorous research should start. What’s also intriguing is that the difference between successful and unsuccessful protests is not clear cut if one follows the cases over time. It is not uncommon for individuals to be deported (i.e. unsuccessful protest), yet the individual returning at a later stage (i.e. successful in preventing the long-term deportation). The qualitative data also provide insights on the strategies actors use in protesting against the deportation of asylum seekers, with several chapters outlining particular protests in detail.

Probst, Johanna, and Dina Bader. 2018. ‘When Right-Wing Actors Take Sides with Deportees. A Typology of Anti-Deportation Protests’. Social Movement Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2018.1456916.

Ruedin, Didier, Sieglinde Rosenberger, and Nina Merhaut. 2018. ‘Tracing Anti-Deportation Protests: A Longitudinal Comparison of Austria, Germany and Switzerland’. In Protest Movements in Asylum and Deportation, 89–115. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74696-8_5. Some supplementary analsis here: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2756235