Abstract
The disadvantages experienced by minorities and lack of societal remedies are partly attributable to native-majority citizens’ limited awareness of minority hardships. We investigate whether informing citizens about field-experimental audits on ethno-racial discrimination increases their recognition of the issue and support for equal-treatment policies. Extending a largely US-centric research frontier, we focus on beliefs about discrimination faced by Muslims in Denmark. To further comprehension, we test three types of framing: a scientist stressing credibility, a lawyer emphasizing the legal breach, or a minority expressing grief. Our survey experiment (n = 4,800) shows that citizens are generally aware of discrimination and tend to overperceive its extent. Communicating audit evidence corrects misperceptions but does not change recognition or policy support, regardless of framing or initial misperception. Only combining priming, correction, and framing temporarily increases recognition and donations to support groups. These findings suggest that audit-based awareness campaigns have limited immediate success beyond donations acknowledging minority hardships.
Original language | English |
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Journal | American Journal of Political Science |
ISSN | 0092-5853 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 29 Nov 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Merlin Schaeffer acknowledges funding from the Carlberg Foundation for the project \u201CMisperceptions about Ethnic Discrimination and Support for Equal Treatment Policies\u201D (ID: CF21\u20100079). Parts of this manuscript were presented at seminars at Sciences Po Paris, VIVE the Danish Center for Social Science Research, Heidelberg University, and the University of Copenhagen. We thank the participants for their useful feedback. We especially thank the editors of , three anonymous reviewers, Hanno Hilbig, Marco Giani, Nina Magdeburg, Joscha Legewie, Nicholas Sambanis, and Yasmin Mohamed Hassan for their helpful comments and suggestions. We are particularly grateful to Kristina Bakk\u00E6r Simonsen, Martin Vin\u00E6s Larsen, Mathilde Cecchini, Jakob Majlund Holm, Tine Birkelund Thomsen, Nikolaj Nielsen, Tarek Hussein, Nanna Margrertge Krusaa, Loubna Mekhchoun, Mohamed Hassan Musse, Yasmin Mohamed Hassan, and Mohammed Albannay for framing field\u2010experimental results for the study participants. AJPS
Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 The Author(s). American Journal of Political Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Midwest Political Science Association.