To understand recent anti‐refugee protests in Europe, we examined how different levels of inclusiveness of group identities (national, European, and global) are related to intentions to protest among native Europeans. We focused on the mediating role of autochthony (a belief that the first inhabitants of a territory are more entitled) and the moderating role of threat. Survey data from 11 European countries (N = 1,909) showed that national identification was positively associated with autochthony, and therefore, with the intention to protest against refugees. In contrast, global identification was related to lower protest intentions via lower autochthony. These paths were found only among Europeans who perceived refugees as a threat. European identification was not related to the endorsement of autochthony or to collective action. These findings indicate why and when majority members are willing to participate in collective action against refugees, and underscore the importance of global identification in the acceptance of refugees.
"This is Munich all over again!": Such comparisons between a present situation and a past one (i.e. a historical analogy) are common in public and political discourses. Historical analogies were used for centuries but have received increased interest in the last 50 years from scholars in political science, history, and psychology. Despite existing interdisciplinary exchanges, it remains difficult to identify the variables involved in the
Comparing present and past situations by means of historical analogy is prevalent in political and public discourses. But when researching this phenomenon, scientists often use reception paradigms, where they ask people which past event is most applicable to a current situation or issue. In these paradigms, analogies are treated as unequivocal—rather than flexible—in their meanings. In this paper, we use a production paradigm to examine why European citizens (in France, Belgium, and Germany) selected historical analogies and justified their meanings following the two 2015 terrorist attacks in France. We find that most participants tend to mention a relatively small number of past events, characterized by similarities in time (recent), space (geographically close) and type (terrorist attacks) with the current attacks. However, a multiple correspondence analysis indicates that, even when they overwhelmingly agree about the relevance of a particular event (the attacks of September 11th 2001) for the present situation, participants confer widely varying—even conflicting—meanings to the “same” analogy, which align with different socio-political attitudes. We suggest that these variations do not just represent the emphasis that different participants place on particular sets of similarities between the past and the present attacks: They also embody specific, and conflicting, stances on salient and controversial issues surrounding the topic of contemporary terrorism (e.g., why were ‘we’ attacked, who deserves to be grieved, how should the government respond). Results are discussed in light of the literature on social representations of both history and terrorism.
The idea that the past holds lessons for the present, under the guise of
historical analogies
, is prevalent in political and public discourse. Those analogies are often accompanied by dire warnings befalling those who “forget” or otherwise neglect the powerful lessons of History—and would then be “doomed to repeat it”, as the saying goes. So, Would remembering history make it seem more OR LESS likely to repeat itself in the future? In other words, does exposure to specific lessons about past events, especially ones involving causal claims, affect how people expect real-life events to turn out? Four studies (three preregistered) tested this experimentally. In Studies 1 and 2, participants expected the same behavior (the US adopting a harsh stance against Iran in the Nuclear Treaty) to result in a more negative outcome when this current stance seemed to match a “lesson” they had read about the break-out of World War II (European leaders adopting a harsh approach against Germany in the 1919 Versailles Treaty vs. a conciliatory approach in the 1938 Munich Agreement). Studies 3 and 4 attempted to eliminate some confounds present in the first two studies and to generalize the effect to different events. While results varied across studies, an internal meta-analysis indicated that the analogical effect on predictions (d = –.08) tended to become stronger as participants’ knowledge about the target situation decreased (d-1SD = –.24). These findings support the possibility of analogical-based predictive effects for real-life political events, and are discussed in light of their research and political implications.
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