Not my neighbor: Social prejudice and support for democracy
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
Not my neighbor: Social prejudice and support for democracy†
Nicholas T. Davis‡
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
University of Alabama
Steven V. Miller
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
Clemson University
In theory, Americans like democracy. In practice, this affection is less clear. People
like power and are reluctant to cede it, even when they legitimately lose political
contests. Why? One explanation involves democracy’s promises: it affords equal
access to levers of power via elections, creating natural tensions among groups
competing over scare material and psychological resources. Given the central role
of race and religion in orienting Americans’ social and political experiences, these
tensions are exacerbated when it comes to power-sharing, especially for socially
prejudiced citizens. Drawing from an intergroup relations framework, we suspect
that white citizens faced with out-group threat may be less inclined to express
appreciation for democratic values because democracy supplies access to out-
groups who make competing demands on the political system. To study this
relationship, this paper explores the concept of neighborliness as an important
form of anti-prejudice and proposes several survey experiments to explore the
conditions under which social prejudice in neighbor interactions affects citizens’
commitments to democratic values and support for democracy.
Key words: democracy, neighbors, neighboring, social prejudice
Word count: 8,680 (excluding references)
†
Paper prepared for presentation at the 2022 annual meeting of the Midwestern Political Science
Association, Chicago, Illinois, April 7 – 10, 2022. Parts of this paper were drawn from the
working monograph, Not my neighbor: How social prejudice affects support for democracy.
‡
Corresponding author, ntdavis2@ua.edu
0
Not my neighbor
Davis and Miller, MPSA 2022
We fall off from the democracy of everyday life
when we direct criticism and zealous correction
not an individual…but at neighbors as members
of a group that to our mind does not belong here.
Nancy Rosemblum (2016, 125)1
American democracy is under siege …This
reaction spreads by sowing racial fears. Right-
wing commentators and activists rail about
“replacement theory,” that the growing numbers
of people of color threaten to “replace” white
America.
Rev. Jesse Jackson (2021)2
Ordinary citizens, pundits and scholars alike often lament that there are deep divisions within the
American mass public. From automotive preferences (Hetherington and Weiler 2018) to the
selection of potential mates (Huber and Malhotra 2016) and to medical decision-making (Crabtree,
Holbein, and Monson 2022), political beliefs apparently explain enormous variation in individuals’
behavior and attitudes. In fact, taking the scope of these differences together, the American mass
public seems deeply polarized – a state of stark dissimilarity that approaches other sectarian divides
like racial, ethnic, and religious conflict (Finkel et al. 2020).3
Certainly, the red-blue, partisan divide in American politics is a chasm both deep and wide
(Layman, Carsey, and Horowitz 2006; Iyengar et al. 2019). However, polarization has also come
1
Rosenblum, Nancy L. 2016. Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America
(Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 125.
2
Jackson, Jesse. “American democracy is under siege.” Chicago Sun Times. Retrieved from:
https://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/2021/12/13/22833301/american-democracy-is-under-
siege
3
Despite the seriousness of polarization as a political phenomenon, the lack of introspection
regarding this description is as unfortunate as it is common: popularly told, such divisions are
observed in far-off backwaters, not the United States. That this country’s singular
institutionalized social divide involves race is often lost or flattened in these stories (an irony
given the social sorting that lays beneath political polarization). In part, this is probably why the
vernacular of “tribe” appears to have taken hold in both lay work and political science research
describing mass social-political polarization. Too often, tribe is deployed in implicitly pejorative
ways as the baser group unit of lesser civilizations fighting over scarce resources. To be sure,
American partisans do not like each other, but greater care is due to the rhetorical frames used by
pundits and scientists, alike, in describing such conflict.
1
Not my neighbor
Davis and Miller, MPSA 2022
to function as a sanitary, though effective way of removing judgment from descriptions of these
divisions. Describing the mass public as polarized both removes the responsibility from any given
party for such divisions, and, critically, obscures whether these differences in opinion are normal
or appropriate on the substantive merits. The problem, of course, is that not all differences among
partisans are a matter of simple aesthetic tastes – differences in support for an insurrection are not
equivalent to differences over the appropriate effective tax rate. Thus, while polarization may
usefully describe differences in political preferences, the concept often conceals deeper fissures
among partisans about basic commitments to the values of democracy. If beliefs about the
legitimacy of election rigging (Clayton et al. 2021) and marches in support of white nationalism
are any indication (Atkinson 2018), political differences among citizens are so profound that they
seem unable to engage in the deliberative processes that are necessary for democratic politics.
To this end, the study of the American mass public’s democratic attitudes has come only
lately to academic research. To be sure, the study of attitudes relevant to a healthy democracy,
involving things like citizens’ commitments to tolerance (Sullivan and Transue 1999), civil liberties
(McCloskey and Brill 1983), ideological non-conformity (Cutler and Kaufma 1975), and voting
rights (Gronke et al. 2019) have rich histories. But inquiry into commitments to objects like
democratic values (e.g. Bright Line Watch,2022) and the democratic order (e.g. Drutman,
Diamond, and Goldman 2018; Miller and Davis 2021) – what comparativists might describe as
regime support – has only recently begun in earnest in American political science, the result of a
visibly and uncommonly undemocratic period that begins with election of Donald Trump to the
presidency and continues to worry experts today.4
The findings produced by this research are normatively troubling. Despite rating
democracy as a fine system of governance, supporting it above alternatives, and recognizing norm
violations (Davis, Gaddie, and Goidel, forthcoming), a non-trivial proportion of the mass public
exhibits soft authoritarian commitments (Drutman, Diamond, and Goldman 2018) and a
willingness to renege on longstanding norms when it is politically expedient (Graham and Svolik
2020; Simonovits, McCoy,and Littvay 2021; Frederiksen 2022). Citizens persuaded by lies about
“the big steal” and have lost confidence in elections after the 2020 presidential election (Clayton et
4
This is not to oversell the integrity of American democracy prior to this point. The United States
wallowed in partial democracy until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and, even then,
struggled to implement the civil integration promised in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for the next
several decades without the threat of injunction. The democratic deficits in the interim – the gap
between the promises of democracy and the production of democratic goods – are severe and still
felt today. Former president Donald Trump was the fulmination of these failures, but it is
important to contextualize that presidency against deeper democratic failures. For their part,
academic political science has been (frustratingly) slow to draw those connections.
2
Not my neighbor
Davis and Miller, MPSA 2022
al. 2021) – attitudes that are not “just” expressive responding but apparently genuine (Graham and
Yair, n.d.).
Within this growing body of research, the finding that anti-democratic attitudes break
somewhat cleanly along partisan lines seemingly dovetails with the broader polarization research
– Democrats are (generally) more supportive of democratic norms than Republicans (Bright Line
Watch, 2022; Cagle and Davis 2022), even as the pressures of the two-party system mean that all
partisans will hold their noses and cast votes for norm-breaking politicians (Graham and Svolik
2020; Simonovits, McCoy,and Littvay 2021). The result is that differences in such attitudes are
treated as yet one more piece of evidence that American partisans live in two separate realities. The
problem with this depiction, of course, is that the rhetorical framing involved in “polarization”
assumes that there are two legitimate perspectives underlying this disconnect. That some citizens
give pro-democratic responses to survey instruments and others authoritarian or violent ones
(Kalmoe and Mason, 2022), however, is not evidence of polarization. It is instead evidence of a
seismic shift in commitments to what scholars call the basic “rules of the game”; evidence that the
democratic consensus is cracking apart at the seams.
Why? Why is it that these partisan differences manifest in different support for democratic
values? What else explains how individuals regard democracy? What ideational material
undergirds different conclusions about the promises of democracy? Recent research suggests that
core political values – focal points that help people understand the complex political environment
(Schwartz, Caprara, and Vecchione 2010; Goren, Smith, and Motta 2020) – have more or less
sorted alongside other social and political identities (Ciuk 2022). Early democratic consensus
grounded in a political culture of Lockean liberalism, which emphasized freedom and
egalitarianism, occurred within a narrow social framework. That is, democratic politics was
historically an environment where democratic values and participation were reserved for a
monolithic racial block – white men. While tensions within modern American political culture
largely still center on equality and individualism (McCloskey and Zaller 1984; Davis, Gaddie and
Goidel forthcoming), the opening of herrenvolk democracy to others via enfranchisement in the
mid-20th Century corresponds to the beginning of a social sorting that involves the grafting of
religious, racial, and ethnic identities onto political ideology (Mason 2018; Davis 2018). One
consequence of this development involves drawing sharp lines involving legitimacy and access to
the polity on the basis of race, thereby creating dissensus not just in core political values, but
democratic ones, as well.
However, while the racial attitudes of white Americans shape democratic preferences
(Miller and Davis 2021), the role of religion – or more specifically, evangelicalism – cannot be
3
Not my neighbor
Davis and Miller, MPSA 2022
ignored. The story of race lynching, Jim Crow, the subsequent fight against integration after the
Civil Rights Act cannot be fully understood without situating institutionalized racism as a piece of
religious expression (Ehrenhaus and Owen 2004). More recently, evangelical discourse after
September 11, 2001 displays an intense, anti-democratic antagonism against Muslims, while the
growth of Christian nationalism in the interim is a “threat to American democracy” (Gorksi and
Perry 2022).5
In many respects, then, prejudice is the plumbline that orients American politics (Roberts
and Rizzo 2021). What’s missing from this research on democratic values, however, is a more
thorough examination of how, much less when social prejudice motivates white Americans to
support or undercut the principles of democracy. In this paper, we begin by sketching out the
relationship between social prejudice, which we define broadly as exclusionary attitudes toward
racial, ethnic, or religious out-groups, and democracy. With a particular emphasis on Rosenblum’s
(2016) concept of neighborliness as a form of anti-prejudice – a key relational quality linked to
pluralism that conveys comfortability with letting “others” into social and sacred spaces – we
propose several survey experiments that explore how the pressures of (neighborly) diversity shape
the conditions under which citizens profess more (and less) support for democracy.
The psychology of social prejudice
Definitions of (social) prejudice are numerous for a concept that seems intuitive. In his
foundational, midcentury work, social psychologist Gordon Allport described prejudice in
relatively simple terms, as “an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization. It may
be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group as a whole or toward an individual
because he is a member of that group” (Allport 1954, 10). In Prejudice and Racism, Jones (1972,
61) takes a similarly broad view, defining prejudice as “an unjustified negative attitude towards
an individual based solely on that individual’s membership in a group.” But while these feelings
involve any “members of socially defined groups” (Stephan 1983, 417), they often involve a
person belonging to a “minority group” (Levin and Levin 1982, 66). Such views are not
accidental nor merely fleeting but encompass a “display of hostile or discriminatory behavior
towards members of a group on account of their membership in that group” (Brown 1995, 8).
5
A quote taken directly from their book, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism
and the threat to American Democracy.
4
Not my neighbor
Davis and Miller, MPSA 2022
Despite competing but often complimentary definitions of social prejudice, there is a
great deal of agreement that prejudice is not ephemeral, but a concrete attitude.6 In other words,
prejudice may dwell within the unseen lands of the human psyche, but it can nevertheless be
observed and, critically, measured.7 Thus, the result is a general tendency to describe prejudice as
the “affective component of intergroup relations” (Brewer and Kramer 1985).
If prejudice involves negative reactions to persons belonging to (minority) social groups,
then such attitudes are bad, according to Allport 1954, 7), because they are faulty or incorrect –
without “sufficient warrant.” Others describe it in plainer terms. Milner (1975, 9) describes
prejudice as an “unjust” attitude, while Rose (1951, 5) proposes that it “justifies discrimination.”
In each of these cases, prejudice is problematic because it violates normative ideals involving
reciprocity. If there are social standards that people ought to follow but don’t for reasons
involving immutable features or stereotypes, then violating these obligations is fundamentally
wrong (Harding et al. 1969).
People may hold prejudices for various reasons, but, across the various intergroup
explanations of social behavior, group salience and categorization play important roles. Prejudice
occurs when people are both sensitive to their own identities (e.g. Simon 2008) and when they are
able to categorize others into attendant in- or out-groups (e.g. Turner et al. 1987). In turn, the
motivations behind these processes are often split into different explanations involving both
material and psychological considerations (e.g. Bobo 1983). Realistic interest approaches suggest
that tangible gains and losses motivate whether individuals engage in discrimination (Esses et al.
2005), while symbolic frameworks convey that prejudice is motivated by positive distinctiveness
(Kinder and Sears 1981) – that is, people hold their in-group in high emotional regard, often at
the expense of an out-group (a process that involves out-group derogation; for a brief, but helpful
review of these dynamics in political science research, see: Huddy and Bankert [2017]).
While the intergroup relations literature is prodigious and social-psychological theories
about the motivations of discrimination numerous, our operating approach casts a wide net with
6
Milner (1981, 112) famously noted that, in regards to defining prejudice, “there are almost as
many definitions of the term as writers who employ it.” This summary isn’t wrong, but there is
still much overlap regarding operating definitions of it.
7
In part, the hidden nature of prejudice and the demands of polite society are why scholars have
shown such interest in “implicit” prejudice (sometimes called “unconscious bias”). For a
discussion about why implicit prejudice is a thorny concept mired in theoretical debate and
practical relevance, see: Mitchell, Gregory, and Philip E. Tetlock. 2017. “Popularity as a poor
proxy for utility: The case of implicit prejudice.” In Lilienfeld, Scott O. and Irwin D. Waldman
(Eds.), Psychological science under scrutiny: Recent challenges and proposed solutions, 164-
195.
5
Not my neighbor
Davis and Miller, MPSA 2022
regards to the general form that social prejudice takes.8 Social prejudice involves exclusionary
and discriminatory attitudes toward others and functions as a parent construct under which racial,
ethnic, and religious discrimination fit. Each respective “type” of prejudice draws from similar
wells within the intergroup conflict literature involving threat. For example, whites’ racism
toward Blacks can occur when they perceive threats to their self-image, values and beliefs, or
resources (Riek, Mania, and Gaertner 2006). Likewise, nativism is grounded in the conflict
between “native” citizens and outsiders (Larsen et al. 2009; Davis et al. 2019; ).9 When non-
natives are perceived to threaten predominating cultural norms or economic wellbeing, prejudice
results (Zárate et al. 2004). Finally, while it is possible that “love they neighbor” jeremiads might
increase sympathy for religious out-groups, “…religious intergroup relations are no different
from any other form of intergroup relation” (Jackson and Hunsberger 1999) – including the
attendant prejudice that surfaces when traditional religious norms are threatened by newly salient
or different religious traditions that involve racial or ethnic outgroups (e.g. Muslims in the United
States after September 11, 2001).
These social prejudices present several problems for democracy. If living in a democratic
community is possible because of a shared commitment to pluralism – a set of social conditions
in which a diversity of views is permitted, if not encouraged – then social prejudice makes it
difficult to engage in peaceful deliberation, much less inclusion. Those biases circumvent the
creed that access to levers of power should ignore characteristics like race or religion. Worse,
they violate the tenets of neighborliness, which are core to a healthy democratic peace
(Rosenblum 2016) – an idea we take up momentarily.
Over the last several decades, the measurement of prejudice has generated enormous
debate about the structure and contours of white Americans’ attitudes toward out-groups (e.g.
Kinder and Sears 1981; Sniderman et al. 1991; Sidanius, Pratto, and Bobo 1996; Bobo 1999;
DeSante and Smith 2020; Carney and Enos n.d.). From symbolic (Kinder and Sears 1981; Kinder
and Sanders 1996) and modern racism (McConahay 1986) to laissez-faire (Bobo, Kluegel, and
Smith 1997) and aversive racism (Gaertner and Dovidio 1986), scholars have devoted significant
time and effort to uncovering the shape and motivations of Americans’ racial views (see also:
8
Despite social psychological frameworks “competing” against each other to “best” describe the
“true” motivations for why people display prejudice, a generous view of these literatures suggests
that different theories have strengths and weaknesses. For our purposes, we believe that symbolic
and material threat contribute to why some white Americans display anti-democratic tendencies.
9
“Native” is a somewhat ironic term in this research agenda in that it doesn’t really involve “first
peoples” who might have had an original claim to a region, but, instead, represents a sort of
(racialized) quasi-citizen concept. To be native in this framework is to be someone who has a
formal claim of belonging; in contrast, non-natives are foreign or, more acrimoniously, alien.
6
Not my neighbor
Davis and Miller, MPSA 2022
DeSante and Smith [2020] and Davis and Wilson’s [2021] recent work in political science).
Despite being an admirable goal, this research agenda is commonly frustrated by disciplinary
silos, terminology, motivations, and goals.10 Prejudice can seemingly be explained by both
symbolic and material demands, may be inherently logical or “principled,” and, perhaps not even
about race at all (e.g. Lerner 1980).
We agree that the psychometric properties of attitudes are important and that the
empirical properties of them should guide theorizing both their functions and the conclusions
drawn about them.11 That said, our approach here is guided by a different theoretical goal. Our
interest is not simply, say, racism or religious discrimination, particularly, but a broader form of
social prejudice involved in the concept of neighborliness (or lack thereof) – whether people
willingly accept or reject living next to someone from a racial, ethnic, or religious out-group. In a
vacuum, there are few reasons why someone should willingly exclude someone from a particular
religious or racial group from their immediate social space. There are certainly rational reasons of
solidarity involved in wanting to live next to one’s kin. And social structures may conspire to sort
and reproduce racial homophily (Sampson and Sharkey 2008). But, at the individual-level,
attitudes involving the exclusion of out-group neighbors on the basis of immutable characteristics
like the color of one’s skin or on other social group memberships like religion, clearly constitute a
thorny form of social prejudice.12 In our view, thinking about these attitudes as a form of social
prejudice not only also sidestep some of the controversy regarding the peculiarities of
longstanding measurement protocols of various forms of, say, racial bias, but has clear
application to democracy.
Not my neighbor – How neighborly exclusion undercuts democratic support
To sketch out a theory for how the rejection of neighborly goodwill constitutes a disturbing form
of social prejudice and, critically, motivates a rebuke of democracy, we begin with a brief
discussion of the relationship between community – the social dimension of neighborhood
environments – and democracy. Friedland (2001, 358) writes plainly that “For democracy to
10
Davis and Wilson’s (2021) book on racial resentment carefully reviews these debates and
controversies and their implications for the study of prejudice in American politics. It is an
uncommonly lucid account of the differences involved in measuring racism across political
science and social psychology literatures.
11
Although we would humbly add that the logic of ordinary experience sometimes seems
strangely foreign to the econometric analysis favored by social scientists, who seem determined
to construe prejudice as uniquely complicated and reducible to a simply keystroke (see: Sen and
Wasow’s [2016] excellent work on this point).
12
In some sense, it is kin to the classic resistance toward integration.
7
Not my neighbor
Davis and Miller, MPSA 2022
work, community is necessary.” Democracy is not just a system in which election are held (e.g.
Przeworski 1991), but requires, on some level, a democratic culture that both values deliberative
debate and promotes participation (Rosenblum 2016). Such conditions are never totally fulfilled,
which lends such features an idealistic quality. Such “strong” views of democracy (Dewey 1928;
Habermas 1962/1989) probably fail on the merits of the evidence that citizens are often too busy
to vote, rarely engage in meaningful exchange, and know only a modest deal about the workings
of politics. But the unfulfillment of these demands is less important than the underlying cultural
commitments to live out such democratic values. In other words the failure of democratic
community does not mute aspirations to achieve it.
Despite this view of community as the ethereal social dimension to neighbor interactions,
communities are also physical. While it is true that the “tightly bounded, well-integrated
community that we associate with the rural village, the city neighborhood, and even the suburb no
longer correspond to a social structure characterized by more complex patterns of mobility and
migration” (Friedland 2001, 364), housed people nevertheless live somewhere. And despite
economic, cultural, and technological upheaval (Castells 1996), the physical community is where
much of citizens’ social experiences and, by extension, experiences with democracy unfold.
Sometimes, the experiences in community are positive, like the shopkeeper looking out for a
child on her way home from the bus stop. But other times community interactions are hostile,
such as when residents slow integration or block outsiders from settling. In that case,
discrimination often prevents individuals from entering in and enjoying the benefits of
community; it prevents others from entering into sacred social spaces.13 When communities
exclude others based on categorical features like race, ethnicity, or religion, the disregard for
commitments to democratic values are revealed. Social prejudice, then, threatens the very fabric
of what political theorist Nancy Rosenblum (2016) labels “the democracy of everyday life.”
Within communities, the most common or routine interactions occur between neighbors.
Of course, this is not to say that all persons in a community are immediate neighbors. That idea is
simultaneously too broad and too restrictive. Neighbors are near to us, but the exact distance
where one transitions from acquaintance to neighbor is hard to explicitly define. “Neighbors are
not just people living nearby,” writes Rosemblum (2016, 2), but are, instead “our environment.”
13
The fact that so many Americans are stationary only serves to reinforce these tendencies – the
percentage of people who have changed residences in the 2020 was the lowest it has been since
the Census began tracking that information (about 8%; Fry, Richard and D’Vera Cohn. 2021. “In
2020, fewer Americans moved, exodus from cities slowed.” Pew Research Center. Retrieved
from: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/12/16/in-2020-fewer-americans-moved-
exodus-from-cities-slowed/.
8
Not my neighbor
Davis and Miller, MPSA 2022
This definition tends to lend “neighbor” an amorphous quality, but it is enough to simply note
that neighbors are proximate relationships that involve both “mutual hospitality” and “a selective
invitation to mind one another’s business” (3). The practice of neighborliness has a moral aspect
and guides one’s expectations and daily encounters with others. In other words, being a “good
neighbor” is both a norm and a practice.14
In several important aspects, neighborliness also functions as a “form of democratic
excellence” (Rosenblum 2016, 7). Despite the novelist’s tendency to depict neighborliness as a
sentimental expression, its practice is deeply emblematic of the demands of democracy.15
Neighbors give and take offense, yet abide by mutual norms that sustain their wellbeing. If “the
stuff of a civilization consists largely of its substantive norms” (Ellickson 1991, xxi), then
neighborliness softens the competitive, individualistic ethos that edges of the individualism that
accompanies American democracy. No man is an island. Not only does neighborliness permit the
sort of (para)social fraternization that is conducive to pluralism, but it counterbalances freedom in
the extreme.
According to Rosenblum’s (2016) work, there are several elements that comprise
neighborliness, or the “democracy of everyday life” – the form of social exchange necessary to
successfully build a democratic culture. Chief among this is the governing normative
commitment to reciprocity, which encourages engaging with people whose categorical attributes
differ from their own. Reciprocity ignores “the rules of social hierarchy, rank, class, kinship, or
sectarianism” that permeate other relationships. To be a good neighbor is to simply return, in
kind, the sort of treatment that sustains peaceable interactions; it is, in some sense, a form of anti-
prejudice.
14
Rosenblum describes the concept of “good neighbor” as a regulatory ideal, an idea that riffs on
Foucault’s notion of something that functions as a norm but is part of a regulatory practice that
controls.
15
It is worth noting, however, that neighborliness is not citizenship. Rosenblum (2016)
acknowledges the tendency to flatten neighborliness as an outgrowth of good citizenship, to
assume that the former is a quality expressed by the latter. But this is wrong on some level.
Neighborliness requires more and less than citizenship. It is not governed by political institutions
or legal codes. And citizenship, which implies being bound to the rules of the game may put
neighborliness in jeopardy. It may be the case that a good neighbor permits activities that actually
contravene the qualities of being a good citizen. A good citizen, for example, might be “required”
to report the moonshine still operating on her neighbor’s back acreage or an undocumented
worker living next door. Neither action may exhibit neighborliness. In our framework, citizenship
is effectively endogenous to “support for democracy”; it is, quite literally, an expression of
democratic values, and linking good citizenship to it feels like selecting on the dependent
variable, as it were.
9Not my neighbor
Davis and Miller, MPSA 2022
This commitment is worked out in several cases, like when neighbors “live and let live.”
The ideal of live and let live means that there may be occasions where people exhibit self-
discipline and allow differences or slights to occur without consequence because they are
interested in the preservation of a status quo. But when neighbors recognize behavior or outcomes
that cannot stand because they are indecent or unbecoming, they may display restraint or speak
out. Both incorporate a form of deliberate self-governance that is grounded in the commitment to
great others as anyone would like to be treated.
Neighborliness fails when these commitments are replaced by exclusion and harm, and
they can be observed in circumstances where community threats are described using the language
of social prejudice. From the panics over Chinese immigrants looking for work in the 19th
Century, to panics over dangerous racialized “no-go” zones, and to Islamophobia linking faith to
terrorism, politicians often connect community, neighbors, and social prejudice when they use
discriminatory rhetoric to talk about the pressing threat of outsiders. “Why do we want all these
people from ‘shithole countries’ coming here?” former president Donald Trump remarked in
2018. In his view, those people were “invading” the country, threatening American
communities.16 This stereotyping fixates on the ascriptive characteristics of the immigrant, which
functions as a rebuke to neighborliness and, critically, “builds walls” – here both literally and
metaphorically. Instead of a higher road marked by a commitment to neighborliness, “[t]here is
no learning. No accommodation. No appreciation of shared reality. No imagination or empathy”
(Rosenblum 2016, 126). If neighboring is the foundation of social cohesion (Forrest and Kearns
2001), then such social prejudice is the antithesis of it.17
These ideas about the importance of neighborliness to democracy bring us to the
following set of expectations. Despite their peculiarities, group conflict theory cuts across racial,
ethnic, and religious forms of prejudice. Whether nativism, religious discrimination, or racism,
prejudice involves categorizing people into groups via harmful stereotypes that are then
essentialized. That is, group characteristics are imputed upon individuals when making
judgments. When that process occurs, group features are assigned to individuals in ways that are
16
Dawsey, Josh. January 12, 2018. “Trump derides protections for immigrants from ‘shithole’
countries.” The Washington Post. Retrieved from:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-attacks-protections-for-immigrants-from-
shithole-countries-in-oval-office-meeting/2018/01/11/bfc0725c-f711-11e7-91af-
31ac729add94_story.html.
17
This argument is not only theoretical. Empirically, the practice of good neighbor –
“neighboring” – is associated with several positive individual level outcomes, like sense of
belonging and security (Henning and Lieberg 1996), and collective ones, like social capital
(Putnam 2000) and community integration (Wu 2016).
10Not my neighbor
Davis and Miller, MPSA 2022
unfair and unjust; convenient distinctions transition from being descriptive to prescriptive (c.f.
Roberts and Rizzo 2021).
In the case of (some) white Americans, “whiteness” can function as a powerful form of
social identity, which involves the incorporation of a group membership into the self-concept
(Jardina 2019). Drawing from social identity theory (Turner et al. 1987), this process involves
viewing an identity group’s goals as central to the psychological wellbeing of the individual – a
feeling of solidarity with the plight of one’s group members. When individuals exhibit racist,
xenophobic, or religiously discriminatory beliefs, they construct distinctions between in- and out-
group members. They demarcate who is the acceptable member of a community and who is the
apostate.
This process strips away the neighborliness that underwrites democratic exchange by
placing a group’s perceived wellbeing ahead of the wellbeing of the larger community. To be a
neighbor is to live in community. A neighbor cuts across these group boundaries in a way that
allows people to live shoulder to shoulder with others. Living in community requires honoring the
values that make democracy possible; rejecting neighbors on the basis of ascriptive features, in
contrast, makes a mockery of democratic culture.18 In this story, then, actively rejecting neighbors
who look or speak differently or practice different religions serves as a form of social prejudice.19
Despite some research that argues that the compositional nature of neighborhoods works similarly
regardless of one’s racial group – that is, whites and blacks express reluctance to live in diverse
neighborhoods because they are more likely to be poorer, less safe, and contain worse schools
(Harris 2001) – our argument sidesteps those findings because it involves imaging immediate
neighbors not the more global community.20 This difference is crucial. To exclude someone as a
direct neighbor invokes a personal contrast different from imaging embedding oneself in a
fundamentally different neighborhood full of the attendant, albeit stereotypical issues that might
be associated with such places.21 Our argument isn’t strictly about place, per se, but people. And,
18
It is important not to confuse what people do with who people are. It is entirely rational for
someone to say “I do not wish to live next to a murderer.” But this is qualitatively different from
saying “I do not wish to live next to someone who speaks a different language.” And despite the
allure of solidarity – i.e. wanting to live next to someone who looks or thinks like you do –
rejecting potential neighbors on account of immutable features is a distinct form of social
prejudice – the very logic that justified state-sponsored segregation in the United States.
19
For an early version of this argument see Miller and Davis (2021).
20
That argument also fails to account for the dramatic growth and self-segregation of exurbs by
white Americans (e.g. Lichter, Parisi Taquino 2015).
21
However, again, we would be remiss not to acknowledge that there is a persistent finding that
white Americans are very reluctant to live in neighborhoods where they are the minority (e.g.
Zubrinsky and Bobo 1996). And while we’ve noted that some research finds these preferences cut
11Not my neighbor
Davis and Miller, MPSA 2022
if democracy extends access and power to all people regardless of race or creed – which includes
those persons who may be undesirable as neighbors – then it may be a threatening system of
governance for the socially-prejudiced because it legitimizes “those people” as equals.
Studying the relationship among neighborliness, social prejudice, and support for democracy
Our past (and ongoing) research illustrates that social prejudice – whether defined via traditional
measures of “negative” attitudes toward racial, ethnic, and religious outgroups or the rejection of
such individuals as neighbors – is linked to less support for democracy. What is less clear is
whether out-group threat and anti-neighborliness causally affect democratic attitudes. In what
follows, we present materials for three survey experiments that attempt to triangulate how anti-
neighborliness affects democratic values and support.
Study 1 – Neighbor diversity and democratic attitudes
Neighborhoods are where the values of neighborliness are stress-tested. They are also where
democratic values are worked out in an intimate manner; local communities are the frontlines of
democracy, supplying opportunities for representation (e.g. serving on local school boards) and
participation (e.g. voting on referenda, tax abatements, and the like) for ordinary citizens within a
context that “matters” deeply to them (community cite). This setting, then, supplies fertile ground
to test the relationship of different forms of out-group threat on democratic attitudes.
The trouble with using “neighborhoods” as a level of abstraction is that neighborhoods
involve an almost corporeal quality – they can be large or small; they can be literal or imaginary
(Rosenblum 2016 + cite). In this study, we randomly assign subjects to one of two configurations
of streets to imagine living on – their immediate “neighborhood.”22 Recall that our argument
about social prejudice is that it functions as a diffuse form of bias that encompasses more than
“just” racism or nativism. It is additive, and it is difficult to measure in an instrumental fashion
across racial groups, recent research finds that “white flight” is persistent and that whites
generally give socially desirable responses about living in diverse neighborhoods (Kye and
Halpern-Manners 2019). Thus, neighborhood preferences may be as politically consequential to
democratic attitudes as neighbor preferences – something we return to in Study 1.
22
Inadvertently and, to some degree, unavoidably, this stylized treatment privileges a suburban
view of neighborhood / community. Not everyone lives on a quarter acre with a white picket
fence; in fact, many times direct neighbors are those people who live down the hall or in the
connecting townhome. No treatment is perfect, and we recognize this as a limitation of this
thought exercise. Study 2 attempts to triangulate this problem by asking subjects to focus on their
next-door neighbor, allowing “next-door” to vary in the mind of the respondent.
12Not my neighbor
Davis and Miller, MPSA 2022
where one can calculate, for example, subtle differences in antiblack vs. anti-Muslim affect. Thus,
our choice of treatments is a “bundled” one. Subjects are not asked to participate in a conjoint
task, where we can seemingly pull out the marginal effect of the share of Hispanics living in a
neighborhood relative the share of Black residents, as if this were a practical way of thinking
about how these biases work (Sen and Wasow 2016). Instead, we attempt to provide some
realistic fidelity to this task by simply describing two scenarios: a “low” (in-group) and “high”
diversity (out-group) setting.
White subjects being by taking a short pre-test questionnaire that includes a task asking
them to identify people with whom they would not want as neighbors (see Table 1 for
questionnaire). Based on responses to this question, we then block randomize individuals by
social prejudice to one of three conditions: (1) placebo control, (2) high diversity neighbors, or
(3) low diversity neighbors.23 Individuals in the latter two conditions are then asked to read the
following prompt.
Now, we would like you to imagine living in a neighborhood with decent schools,
a fair cost of living, and where access to restaurants and other outdoor activities
like parks and a community pool are only a short drive away. [The neighbors on
your street are a diverse group from different racial and religious backgrounds. /
The neighbors on your street might look a lot like you.] To help you imagine
yourself in this place, we’ll show you a few pictures of some of the people who
might live on your street. Afterwards, we’ll ask you to rate how comfortable
you’d be moving to this neighborhood and conclude with a few more unrelated
questions.
Figures 1 and 2 portray the images associated with the high and low diversity treatments,
respectively. Each image in Figure 1 roughly corresponds to a mirror image in Figure 2. For
example, a smiling Muslim couple (Figure 1) can be juxtaposed against a smiling white couple
(Figure 2); likewise, an older Hispanic man in Figure 1 has a similar white counterpart in Figure
2. After viewing the set of images, we ask subjects to convey on a scale of 1 to 10 how
comfortable they would be moving in to a house on this street.24 Then, they answer several
questions meant to capture their support for democracy.
23
Block randomization by social prejudice is necessary to ensure that we evenly spread those
who exhibit social prejudice out among the conditions. Past research suggests that anywhere
between 15 and 20 percent of respondents give a “social prejudice” response to the neighbor
preferences battery (see Table 1), so it is necessary to ensure that we do not, by random chance,
isolate such respondents in any one condition.
24
The images were chosen strategically and pulled from Google images. Given the large
literature regarding facial attractiveness (see: Little 2021 for a review), we attempted to balance
the photos so as to not stack the deck visually – in other words, we avoided “threatening” facial
cues (frowns, displeasure) and used only stock photography that did not give off contextual
background cues (urban or suburban settings).
13Not my neighbor
Davis and Miller, MPSA 2022
Given pressures of out-group threat, we would expect individuals in the high-diversity
condition to report less positive dispositions toward democracy. In contrast, individuals in the
low-diversity condition should report higher ratings of support for democracy. We also compare
outcomes from both groups against a placebo control to assess how priming a neighborhood’s
demographic composition shapes democratic views compared to latent democratic support.
Because we collect the neighbor preferences battery, we also plan to explore whether
there are heterogenous treatment effects among the socially prejudiced. We would expect that
persons who supplied a anti-neighborly responses to the battery would be more likely to be
negatively affected by the “high diversity” condition relative other subjects. These people should
convey especially negative evaluations of democracy / commitments to democratic values.
14Figure 1. Treatment images for street with “high diversity”
15Not my neighbor
Davis and Miller, MPSA 2022
Figure 2. Treatment images for street with “low diversity”
16Table 1. Selected instruments from Study 1 questionnaire
Pre-test
Neighbor preferences
On the list below are different people who you might encounter in your neighborhood. Please
select those persons on the list who you would NOT want as your next-door neighbor.
Drug addict
People of a different race
Lawyer
Immigrant
People who practice a different religion
Unmarried couples living together
People who speak a different language
A heavy drinker
Loud partiers
A previously-convicted non-violent felon
Post-test
Manipulation check
Having thought about this neighborhood, how comfortable would you be living on a street with
these people? (1) very uncomfortable…(10) very comfortable
Democratic values / support
Please convey which of the following two ideas comes closer to how you think about voting: (1)
Voting is a right or (2) voting is a privilege.
Do you strongly agree (1), agree (2), neither agree nor disagree (3), disagree (4), or strongly
disagree (5) with the following statements?
People should be required to demonstrate civic knowledge before voting.
Military officials would make better government leaders than elected officials.
Note: Full survey includes the usual suspects regarding sociodemographic information.
17Not my neighbor
Davis and Miller, MPSA 2022
Study 2 – Priming the “other”
If Study 1 attempts to prime the neighborhood context, Study 2 involves priming the qualities of
the next-door neighbor. This context is the most intimate neighborly relationship by virtue of
proximity. The next-door neighbor may be the tenet to your left, the folks who live in the
detached house next to yours, or the people who stay on the property adjacent to your acreage.
Regardless of the actual physical proximity, however, there is intimacy in the idea of “next-door
neighbor.” This is the person most proximate to the everyday mundanity of one’s life.
Study 2 involves a simple racial cue priming experiment. Subjects take a brief pre-test
and are then told that they’ll be randomly assigned to view a profile of someone who will be
moving in next door. The prompt’s text reads:
Now, imagine that tomorrow you are getting a new next-door neighbor. You’ll be
randomly assigned a profile of this new neighbor. Please read their brief
biography carefully. After, you’ll be asked a question about how comfortable
you’d be with this person as your next-door neighbor.
Subjects are then given the exact same biographical sketch across conditions; the only difference
involved the visual cue (race) of the figure in each vignette, along with the phrase used to
describe the potential new neighbor. The vignettes are available in Figure 2. Each image is
cropped to the same dimensions, includes the same white background, and depicts an unsmiling,
younger-middle-aged man. Per Lucas et al. (2011), the images exhibit rough parity in
attractiveness and facial structure.
Conditions 1 – 3 correspond to the neighbor preferences battery insofar as they contain
persons who belong to a different race, are an immigrant, or may speak a different language. As
such, we have no concrete expectations about differences in the positivity of democratic attitudes
for subjects randomly assigned to these groups. However, subjects in those three conditions
should be, on balance, more negative in their support for democracy relative white subjects
assigned to condition 4, which depicts a traditional white man. Again, we test for heterogenous
treatment effects by exploring whether persons who exhibit social prejudice are more likely to
supply weaker commitments to democracy than those who do not exhibit such bias.
In Study 2, we again collect pre-test information about subjects’ neighbor preferences
along with demographic data. Then, after reading the vignette of their new, hypothetical next-
door neighbor, we collect subjects’ views about whether this person would be suitable to them.
Finally, we conclude with a series of questions that tap into participants’ support for democratic
values.
18Not my neighbor
Davis and Miller, MPSA 2022
Figure 2. Study 2 treatments and vignettes.
(1) African American (3) Muslim
Jerome Jones is single, African American man in Adeel Shah is a single Muslim man in his late
his late 30s. He works as an administrative 30s. He works as an administrative services
services manager at a local business and has a manager at a local business and has a bachelor’s
bachelor’s degree in accounting from a small degree in accounting from a small public
public university. He is unmarried, but has a university. He is unmarried, but has a young
young child who will occasionally stay with him child who will occasionally stay with him every
every other weekend. other weekend.
(2) Immigrant (Hispanic) (4) White
Miguel Hernandez is a single man in his late 30s Sam Jones is a single Caucasian man in his late
who recently immigrated to the United States. 30s. He works as an administrative services
He works as an administrative services manager manager at a local business and has a bachelor’s
at a local business and has a bachelor’s degree in degree in accounting from a small public
accounting from a small public university. He is university. He is unmarried, but has a young
unmarried, but has a young child who will child who will occasionally stay with him every
occasionally stay with him every other weekend. other weekend.
Notes: Stimuli taken from Lucas, Heather D., Joan Y. Chiao, and Ken A. Paller. 2011. “Why
some faces won’t be remembered: Brain potentials illuminate successful versus unsuccessful
encoding for same-race and other-race faces.
19Not my neighbor
Davis and Miller, MPSA 2022
Table 2. Selected instruments from Study 1 questionnaire
Pre-test
Neighbor preferences
On the list below are different people who you might encounter in your neighborhood. Please
select those persons on the list who you would NOT want as your next-door neighbor.
Drug addict
People of a different race
Lawyer
Immigrant
People who practice a different religion
Unmarried couples living together
People who speak a different language
A heavy drinker
Loud partiers
A previously-convicted non-violent felon
Post-test
Manipulation check
Would you like or not like this person to be your new next-door neighbor? (1) would not want as
next-door neighbor…(10) would want as next-door neighbor
Democratic values / support
Please convey which of the following two ideas comes closer to how you think about voting: (1)
Voting is a right or (2) voting is a privilege.
Do you strongly agree (1), agree (2), neither agree nor disagree (3), disagree (4), or strongly
disagree (5) with the following statements?
People should be required to demonstrate civic knowledge before voting.
Military officials would make better government leaders than elected officials.
Please indicated how important you think the following features are to democracy. 1 (not
important…10 (important)
Government officials are appropriately punished for misconduct.
Government agencies are not used to monitor, attack, or punish political opponents.
Government does not interfere with journalists or news organizations
Government protects individuals’ right to engage in unpopular speech or expression
All adult citizens have equal opportunity to vote
The geographic boundaries of electoral districts do not systematically advantage any
particular political party
Elected officials seek compromise with political opponents
Government protects individuals’ right to engage in peaceful protest
The law is enforced equally for all persons
Incumbent politicians who lose elections publicly concede defeat
20Not my neighbor
Davis and Miller, MPSA 2022
Study 3 – Neighbors and (dis)similarity
Study 3 builds on the simple racial cues supplied to subjects in studies 1 and 2. In this
experimental design, we press into the ideas of similarity and dissimilarity to test whether
subjects can be primed out of their biases, by emphasizing unity, or pushed further into anti-
neighborliness, by imaging dissimilarities. To accomplish this, we use a 2x2 design that varies
both group status and the characteristics we ask subjects to focus on. In each condition, we tell
subjects to imagine a next-door neighbor and direct them to write a few short comments about
this person. In the first two conditions, subjects are asked to imagine a next-door neighbor who
looks like them. The key differences is whether we ask them to focus on their perceived
similarities (condition 1) or differences (condition 2). In the third and fourth groups, we ask
subjects to imagine a next-door neighbor who looks different from them on the basis of race or
religious preferences. Again, we ask subjects to either imagine differences (condition 3) or
similarities (condition 4) they share with these out-group neighbors. Finally, condition five
(control) functions as a true baseline against which to compare the in- and out-group neighbor
conditions. Here, subjects simply take the pre- and post-test questionnaire (the same instrument
depicted in Table 1). The full text of the different prompts is available in Table 2. Again, we
conclude the experiment by asking subjects some questions about their attitudes toward
democracy.
Our expectations are simple. We suspect that support for democracy should be highest in
the in-group similarity condition (low threat) and lowest in the out-group dissimilarity condition
(high threat). The other two conditions supply different ways of nibbling around the edges of how
group dynamics operate. If dissimilarity is negative – and negative information is threatening or
weights more heavily on the brain (Ito et al. 1998) – then perhaps there would be no differences
in the in- and out-group dissimilarity conditions. But, given that we’ve asked subjects to ruminate
on racial, ethnic, or religious characteristics of the imaginary neighbor, that contrast allows us to
test whether any neighborly dissimilarity suppresses democratic support or if it is specific to
conditions where an out-group member is present.
Study 3 uses the study 1 questionnaire to collect participants’ views about potential
neighbors and support for democracy. In addition, because the manipulation is partially a writing
task, we plan to analyze the text to in each group to assess substance and polarity. We would
expect that the most negative reflections about the imaginary neighbor will occur in the out-group
dissimilarity condition.
21Table 2. Treatment vignettes for Study 2
Condition 1: In-group differences Condition 2: In-group similarities Condition 3: Out-group differences Condition 4: Out-group similarities
Next, we’d like you to spend a few Next, we’d like you to spend a few Next, we’d like you to spend a few Next, we’d like you to spend a few
moments thinking about your moments thinking about your moments thinking about your moments thinking about your
neighborhood. Imagine that the house neighborhood. Imagine that the house neighborhood. Imagine that the house neighborhood. Imagine that the house
or apartment next door is recently or apartment next door is recently or apartment next door is recently or apartment next door is recently
vacant. Tomorrow new neighbors are vacant. Tomorrow new neighbors are vacant. Tomorrow new neighbors are vacant. Tomorrow new neighbors are
moving in, and they are pretty similar moving in, and they are pretty similar moving in, and they are a bit different moving in, and they are a bit different
to you. Maybe you speak the same to you. Maybe you speak the same from you. Maybe their first language from you. Maybe their first language
language, work in similar places, and language, work in similar places, and isn’t English, they belong to a isn’t English, they belong to a
go to the same community events or go to the same community events or different racial group, and they different racial group, and they
church. Try to picture these neighbors church. Try to picture these neighbors practice a different religion. Try to practice a different religion. Try to
in your mind. in your mind. picture these neighbors in your mind. picture these neighbors in your mind.
Now, we’d like you to write a Now, we’d like you to write a Now, we’d like you to write a Now, we’d like you to write a
sentence or two about the potential sentence or two about the potential sentence or two about the potential sentence or two about the potential
differences that you could imagine commonalities between you and these differences that you could imagine commonalities between you and these
would come between you and these neighbors. What are some benefits would come between you and these neighbors. What are some benefits
neighbors. What are some difficulties that you imagine might arise from neighbors. What are some difficulties that you imagine might arise from
that you imagine might arise from having these folks as your as your that you imagine might arise from having these folks as your as your
having these folks as your as your neighbors? Despite your differences, having these folks as your as your neighbors? Despite your differences,
neighbors? What complications or what advantages or benefits might neighbors? What complications or what advantages or benefits might
misunderstandings might arise arise from having these new misunderstandings might arise from arise from having these new
despite your similarities? neighbors? these neighbors being different from neighbors?
you?
Notes: The full experimental matrix is a 2 (group) x 2 (similarity) design. In addition to the four treatments listed here, a fifth placebo condition
serves as a true baseline to gauge democratic opinions.
22You can also read
