The Outsider

Prejudice and Politics in Italy

Paul M. Sniderman, Pierangelo Peri, Rui J.P. de Figueiredo Jr., Thomas Piazza

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691094977, 9780691048390
• eBook ISBN: 9780691223858
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

One of the most wide-ranging studies of prejudice undertaken in a decade, The Outsider combines new research methods and rich analysis to upend many of our assumptions about prejudice. Noting that hostility toward immigrants has been on the rise throughout Western Europe, Paul Sniderman and his team conduct the first study of prejudice in Italy and offer insights applicable to nearly all countries worldwide. The study of prejudice, they argue, has been both stimulated and limited by tensions among partial theories. Prejudice and group conflict are said to be rooted in the psychological makeup of individuals, or alternatively, to spring from real competition over material goods or social status, or yet again, to follow in the wake of a quest for identity. It is the distinctive effort of The Outsider to develop a unified theory of prejudice integrating personality, realistic conflict, and social identity approaches.


Drawing on computer-assisted interviewing, this book focuses on Italy partly because it has experienced two different waves of immigration, from Northern Africa and Eastern Europe, and thus allows one to consider to what extent the color of immigrants' skin imposes a special burden of prejudice. Italy is also an apt site for the study of intolerance because of long-standing prejudices that have existed internally, between Northern and Southern Italians. The book's findings show that any point of difference--color, nationality, or language--marks the immigrant as an outsider. The fact of difference, not the particular mode of difference, is crucial. Moreover, the general election of 1994 provided a rare opportunity to investigate the political impact of prejudice when the party system was itself in the process of transformation. The authors uncover a potential line of cleavage: rather than prejudice being concentrated on the political right, it has a wide following among the less educated of the political left.


Analyzing the contributions of personality, social-structural factors, and political orientation to the wave of intolerance toward immigrants, The Outsider offers unprecedented insights into the phenomenon of prejudice and its link to politics.

————— CHAPTER 1 —————

Introduction

TWO STORIES, both reported in a Milan newspaper, the Corriere Delia Sera:¹ The first comes from Genoa and the latter from Rome:

[A]t 3 o'clock in the morning, Samlal Ali, a 24-year-old Moroccan, was selling cigarettes to passers-by. A car with four youths inside stopped in front of him. The man sitting next to the driver leaned out and said something to the Moroccan. He then grabbed him by the neck and pulled his head into the car. Then, at 80 kph, the Moroccan was dragged along the asphalt for a kilometer, hanging onto the car, his head trapped in the window, crashing into parked cars, rubbish bins, and lamp-posts. The men in the car hit him repeatedly. The nightmare was only ended when the car was stopped by a police patrol. The four men, Massimiliano Bordonaro and Constantino Carta, both 23, Davide Cavallaro, 18, and Giovanni Mariani, 30, have been arrested for attempted murder.

[T]wo Egyptians were attacked by a group of seven skinheads. One of them, Phami Sbawio, 33, was treated at the Grassi hospital for cuts and grazes on his arms and legs. This assault happened at just after one o'clock in Viale delle Repubbliche Marinare as the two foreigners were on their way home. The gang was probably waiting in ambush like the one sprung on the young leftists the other week, when the former secretary of the WWF Fabio Converto was left bleeding on the ground in the front of the station. With his fair hair he had been mistaken for a Pole. And yesterday, once again in front of the Ostia station, a group of skinheads wearing bomber jackets casually told a TV crew, 'They did well to whack that Tunisian. They come over here, take our jobs and steal our women.'

Yesterday evening, the mayor Fancesco Rutelli appealed to all Romans not 'to tolerate this brutal and mindless violence.' Also because between now and the elections the Wild West of Ostia-Fiumicino is liable to explode. Standing for the Right is the ex-fascist Teodoro Buontempo . . . who has never concealed his sympathies for the skinhead Nazis.

Only two stories in a newspaper, but they drive home the depth of the problem. It is again a time of refugees in Western Europe. They are making their way from former colonies of the West in Africa and Asia and of Russia in Eastern Europe, attempting to escape poverty or find asylum, sometimes intending to return, sometimes not. Many have found refuge, contributing to the countries that have given them sanctuary. But a storm has been gathering around them. Its force is felt, most conspicuously, in acts of violence committed by individuals clumped at the periphery of contemporary European societies. Less visibly but no less consequentially, political institutions at their center show the stress. These strains of intolerance—their strength, their deeper-lying sources, their impact on the politics of the society as a whole—deserve exploration.

STARTING POINTS

Two problems provided the point of departure for our study. The first concerns the distinctive status of race in marking others as outsiders. Even people who are diligently unreflective have shown themselves capable of impressive powers of imagination in finding, or formulating, lines to mark off those who belong to their group and those who do not. Over a range of historical conflicts, however, a limited number of cleavages have been particularly prominent—among them, class, religion, ethnicity, and nationality, and last, but hardly least, race.

Whatever was true of other eras, it seemed to us that differences of race now cut deeper. In taking this view, we did not doubt the divisiveness of other cleavages, particularly ethnicity and nationality. With the myriad clashes from Yugoslavia through Rwanda, it would call for a special measure of obtuseness to overlook the murderous variety of group differences. Yet, differences of race, we reasoned, can be stigmatizing in a way that other differences need not be. However long African immigrants live in their new country, however well they learn its language, with however much self-restraint and dignity they bear the blows that fall on them, they are marked off by their color. Just so far as they are visibly different, they cannot escape notice of their difference. And the visible sign of their difference, the color of their skin, is indiscriminately connected to a complex of associations—emotional, symbolic, historical, even psychosexual—so much so as to make blacks specially vulnerable to the prejudices of others. All who have come from outside a society aiming to make their way within it labor under a burden of prejudice. But blacks, we feared, bear a heavier burden.

The second problem has to do with the roots of prejudice. It once was common to conceive of prejudice as an intrinsically—and narrowly—psychological phenomenon. So conceived, prejudice was not connected to the actual world, to the frictions, abrasions, and conflicts for the limited goods on offer, whether material or symbolic. Prejudice was psychological in the specific sense of being irrational, and both psychological and irrational in the still narrower sense of being principally rooted in the interior lives of individuals, in the inner conflicts and emotional wounds that they suffered in the course of their early development rather than in the stream of their experiences as adults in the larger society and economy.

But fashions in explanation come and go. Psychological analyses in general, and personality-centered ones in particular, have fallen out of style. Once familiar chords of explanation—of authoritarian submission and dominance, of overcontrolling fathers and overwhelmed children, of dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity—now have a recognizable quality of quaintness, where they are recognized at all. No form of explanation, it is true, disappears entirely from the market of ideas, and it is part and parcel of the ordinary commerce of social science for those versed in one form of analytic transaction to think little of those who practice another. It is therefore all the more striking that it is psychologists themselves who have undertaken root-and-branch critiques of personality-based analyses of prejudice² and that even their canonical reviews of prejudice research now pay only perfunctory attention to personality-centered explanations, summarizing the work, it almost seems, out of historical courtesy.³ The explanatory parade has marched on, with considerations of group identity and group interest, the social, the cognitive, and the economic, taking the lead and personality factors lagging far behind. Yet the new perspectives, illuminating as they are, nonetheless seemed to us to miss the distinctively irrational, emotional, and expressive character of prejudice highlighted by the classical personality-centered perspective. So we took as one of our principal objectives the aim of demonstrating that prejudice is rooted less in the actual interplay of social and economic life than in the deep-lying folds of individuals' psychological makeup.

This book is a record of how, under the pressure of our own results, we have been required, if not to reject then fundamentally rethink both of the major ideas we held at the start.

FORMS OF PREJUDICE: THE "SWITCH" EXPERIMENT

There is, regrettably, no shortage of sites for a study of prejudice and politics. France, for example, is an obvious possibility. The National Front, under Jean LePen, openly campaigns on a plank of returning France to the French, working to incite hostility toward immigrants, not to mention taking pride in a succession of anti-Semitic thrusts. The Front, moreover, has continued to increase its margin of popular support, now approaching one out of every six or seven votes, in the process acquiring sufficient electoral strength to splinter the traditional right in the most recent regional elections. Germany is an equally obvious site. The German People's Union, a party on the far right running on an antiforeigner and anti-European platform, made a striking breakthrough in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt; and Eastern Germany generally, not to mention a swath of Western Germany, has been pockmarked by skinhead violence and public agitation against immigrants. For that matter, Austria, with its thick history of anti-Semitism and the transformation of the traditionally conservative Freedom Party, in the 1980s, to a party of the extreme right, surely has much to recommend it as a site for the study of prejudice and politics. Then, too, Belgium, with its deepening internal divisions and the ballooning of support for the "Flemish Block," appears nearer crisis than any of the others.

All of these countries illustrate two crucial conditions for the study of prejudice and politics. The first is a deep strain of intolerance, in Western Europe now characteristically focused on immigrants or foreigners. The second is the emergence of at least one political party publicly committed to mobilizing public resentment against immigrants or foreigners. The second condition matters as much as the first. To realize the full potential of the politics of prejudice and group conflict, private grievances need a public vehicle.

Italy satisfies the first condition, and not merely because of the rash of hate acts against immigrants. Charges that immigrants are sopping up public benefits have become routine; so, too, have claims that immigrants promote crime, spread disease, and increase unemployment. Italy satisfies the second condition, too. Intolerance has visibly leached from the margins of the political system to very near its center. In the mid-1990s at least three of the political parties—Alleanza Nazionale, the Lega Nord, and Forza Italia—bid for public support by campaigning against the new immigrants. In a way inconceivable in the United States for all the nativism of the American tradition, political argumentation in Italy can be xenophobic and chauvinistic; and it is difficult to believe that the wave of prejudice against immigrants has crested.

But to understand the forces responsible for this eruption of intolerance, it first is necessary to fix what constitutes prejudice. How should it be defined? Can prejudice be pinned down? And what distinguishes a person who is prejudiced from one who is not? On the face of it, the answers to these questions are straightforward. There may be problems at a practical level. Perhaps because of the pressure to say the socially acceptable thing, perhaps because of the lack of time, it may not be possible to pin down the level of prejudice toward a particular group in a standard public opinion interview. And out of a concern for theoretical fastidiousness, some definitional crossing of t's and dotting of i's no doubt is in order. But a consensus has been reached on the core meaning of prejudice.

This consensus summarizes what thoughtful people have come to believe constitutes the heart of prejudice and it includes such obvious features as sterotyping, thinking ill of others without justification, and rigidity. But how to think about prejudice is, we have become persuaded, a question that should be thought through again. Speaking in the abstract, it sounds reasonable to say that prejudice involves characterizations of others that are stereotypical. Yet who is to say which characterizations are stereotypical? Are there truly objective standards to determine which assertions about groups, apart from the indisputably pathological, are true and which are false? And if there are not, is the definition of prejudice only a matter of convention, of political correctness if you will?

Our concern is not about the meaning of words. Our concern is to clarify the meaning of prejudice so that we can pick it out in the actual world and catch hold ofthat in which it truly consists. And the view that we take of prejudice, which we detail in the next chapter, has turned out to have potentially profound implications about the nature of prejudice that we did not see at all at the start.

We started with the presumption that for all the varieties of group conflict, the cleavage over race—the cleavage between black and white, above all—has defined the most fundamental terms in which we approach issues of bigotry and discrimination at the end of the century. Saying this may give the impression of being ethnocentric about ethnocentrism itself, implying that the problem of intolerance cannot rightly be understood outside of an American context. All that we can say is that in our research project in Italy, all who took part, Italians as much as Americans, believed that blacks must bear a special burden by virtue of being black.

Indeed, our shared conviction that differences of race are specially stigmatizing was our common reason for selecting Italy as a site for the study of prejudice and politics. For there are two distinct streams of immigration, one from Africa—from Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Senegal, and Somalia—the other from Eastern Europe—from Poland, Albania, and the former Yugoslavia. The first stream of immigrants is thus very largely (though not completely) black; the second, white. Here, then, is a natural experiment. Immigrants, whether from Africa or Eastern Europe, bear a burden of intolerance by virtue of being immigrants. But if we show that immigrants to Italy who are black bear a heavier burden by virtue of being black, then we should demonstrate that differences of race cut deeper than differences of ethnicity or nationality.

This idea of the special burden of blacks was one of the animating hypotheses of our study, though to speak of it as a hypothesis does not capture our certainty of its truth at the start of the study. All of us were sure it was so, and we only went about the business of conducting an experiment to demonstrate it was so because knowing something to be the case is not a substitute for showing it to be the case. So we took advantage of computer-assisted interviewing to conduct a specially designed experiment, the "Switch" experiment, in order to drive home the distinctiveness of race.

There is a standard litany of praises for genuinely randomized experiments, and no doubt we would have recited it just as others have but for the "Switch" experiment. So, before seeing the results of this experiment, we would have said that experiments have the power to persuade because they have the power to surprise—the power, that is, to demonstrate convincingly that the world is not as it has habitually been taken to be. But in speaking of the power of experiments to surprise we would tacitly have had in mind that it is others who would be caught up to find the world is not as they too confidently assumed it to be. In fact, it turned out that the results of the "Switch" experiment took us by surprise. Although it was designed to demonstrate that differences of race cut deeper than those of ethnicity and nationality, it instead showed that the wave of prejudice and group conflict now washing over Western Europe is more menacing than has been recognized because the readiness to categorize others as belonging to a group other than one's own is more indiscriminate than we had imagined.

This indiscriminateness throws a new light, we believe, on the nature of prejudice, exposing the fundamental sense in which prejudice truly is blind. For it is not, in the end, about the particular ways in which a group either is different or is said to be different; it is instead, at its core, about the fact that it is judged to be different. It is, we think, important to work toward a stronger grip on the nature of contemporary forms of intolerance. But we shall argue that prejudice, in addition to deserving attention in its own right, also merits attention because its consequences, when they spill over into politics, are not merely individual but societal.

THE VULNERABILITY OF THE LEFT: THE "RIGHT SHOCK" MODEL

It is the conviction of every informed observer that the eruption of anger and resentment over immigrants in Western Europe strengthens the hand of the political right there. Our results agree. But they go farther by exposing the basis of the vulnerability of the left.

The pivot point of our account is a cluster of values, including the importance of guaranteeing order, upholding authority, maintaining discipline, which we label "authority" values. This cluster of values is part of the core platform of the political right; and what is more, commentators on the right as well as the left would agree that they can provide a political base for opposition to immigrants and immigration. The rhetoric of immigrants' intruding their foreign customs and manners into daily life, of taking jobs away from native citizens, and of profiting from public assistance all resonate naturally and effectively with the right's emphasis on order, authority, and tradition. So very nearly everyone believes and so we shall show.

The core of our contribution consists of two further lines of argument. The first concerns the character of the causal connection between authority values and prejudice. It is standardly argued that the more firmly and consistently that citizens are committed to the values of authority, the more susceptible they are to the intolerance of others, very much including immigrants. The possibility that struck us as pivotal, however, is that the causal relation may run in both directions. Commitment to the values of order and authority can stoke hostility to immigrants. But hostility to immigrants also can stoke the appeal of the values of the right.

We draw out the implications of this hypothesis of reciprocal causation as we proceed, but we want to draw attention to one of the intuitions underlying it. The study of prejudice has emphasized, above all, the sources of hostility toward outgroups in the psychology and social circumstances of individuals: for example, those with the advantage of an extended education are, by virtue of their years of formal schooling, less susceptible to the strains of intolerance than those with comparatively little of it; or, again, those who live at the margins of society are more vulnerable to the appeals of prejudice than those situated at its center. But the level of intolerance in a society also can rise and fall along with the stream of changes within it. As pioneering studies have shown, a surge in the inflow of immigrants,⁴ for example, can cause spikes in the aggregate levels of hostility toward immigrants; so, too, can a slump in the economy.⁵

The second line of argument is this. The more we have worked to specify the sources of prejudice, the more important it has seemed to us essential to acknowledge the embeddedness of the prejudice in the world of actual events, and although the design of our study does not permit us to get a direct grip on it, it has supplied the key intuition informing our formal account of the interplay of prejudice and politics, the "Right Shock" model. It is necessary, we suggest, to take account of a class of changes in the economy and society. Generalizing over the specific forms these changes can take, this set of societal changes can economically be represented as external shocks. Under the assumptions of the "Right Shock" model, hostility to immigrants is taken to be a function of the force of these shocks independent of the impact of the cir...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: The Nature of Prejudice: Race and Nationality as Bases of Conflict
• Chapter 3: A Theory of Prejudice and Group Conflict
• Chapter 4: Prejudice and Politics
• Chapter 5: Conclusion: Intolerance and Democracy
• Appendix I: Sampling and Weighting
• Appendix II: Construction of Measures
• Appendix III: Missing Data
• Appendix IV: Instrumental Variables
• Appendix V: Accounting for Measurement Error: An Alternative Estimation of the "Two Flavors" and "Right Shock" Models
• Appendix VI: The Survey Questionnaire
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index