What role does intergroup bias play in mass public opinion on foreign policy? Existing work suggests that individual attitudes about foreign policy are not only a product of elite-driven cueing and core value orientations, but also of the fundamental propensity of individuals to demarcate the world around them into ethnic/racial ingroups and outgroups. Building on the group-centric policy evaluation literature, the Prejudice First Model (PFM) suggests that individuals form foreign policy attitudes as a function of relational group identity – i.e., of an individual’s ingroup and the perceived "closeness" of that ingroup to outgroups being evaluated.
We put the implications of the PFM to a direct, causal test in a pre-registered survey experiment with representative samples (over 19,500 respondents) from 13 European countries (Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, UK) to determine whether intergroup bias plays a role in individual foreign policy attitudes. In contrast to previous studies, our experiment focuses on a real world scenario: the persecution of religious minorities by the Chinese state. In our experiment, we manipulate the religious identity of the persecuted group, randomly assigning respondents to read about Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, or Taoists. We then ask respondents questions that measure the extent to which they: (1) think their country or the United Nations (UN) should take action to stop persecution; (2) personally oppose the religious persecution; and (3) would be willing to sign a petition against the religious persecution. Given the robust evidence of anti-Muslim bias in immigration and labour market attitudes in many European countries, we hypothesize that individuals will express less supportive foreign policy preferences when asked about the persecution of Muslims relative to the other religious groups. Additionally, given that the scenario presented to respondents is relational – i.e., an actor persecutes another actor – attitudes towards the actor engaging in persecution may moderate any effects associated with the identity of the persecuted group. Accordingly, we test whether respondents’ attitudes towards China moderate treatment effects.
We find significant variation in the extent to which the results support the PFM. In seven countries, we find causal evidence of an anti-Muslim bias in foreign policy attitudes; in two countries, a pro-Christian effect manifests; and, in four countries, there is little evidence of any type of intergroup bias. We also find that respondents who view China positively are less likely to support interventionist foreign policy, regardless of the religious group being persecuted. Taken together, these results suggest that intergroup bias may influence foreign policy attitudes in some contexts but not in others.
In addition to bringing a comparative lens to the study of foreign policy attitudes, we demonstrate that the extent to which the PFM explains foreign policy attitudes varies across different country contexts; identify anti-Muslim bias across several different countries besides the United States; and show that anti-Muslim bias is domain specific, e.g.. although discrimination against Muslims in employment is prevalent, we find no evidence of the same bias in foreign policy attitudes.
