Can exposure to successful celebrities from a stigmatized group reduce prejudice toward that group writ large? We study the sudden and phenomenal rise to fame of Liverpool F.C. soccer star Mohamed Salah, a visibly Muslim player. We estimate the causal effect of Salah joining Liverpool F.C. on Islamophobia using hate crime reports throughout England, 15 million tweets from British soccer fans, and a survey experiment of Liverpool fans. We find that Merseyside (home to Liverpool F.C.) experienced a 16% drop in hate crimes, compared to a synthetic control. There is no similar effect for other types of crime. We also find that Liverpool fans halved their rates of posting anti-Muslim tweets relative to fans of other top-flight clubs. The survey experiment suggests that the salience of Salah's Muslim identity is important for reducing prejudice against Muslims more broadly. Our findings indicate that positive exposure to outgroup role models can decrease prejudice.
To interpret elections, social scientists and media pundits often ask: how much did particular groups, or voting blocs, contribute to a candidate’s vote total? Analysts often answer this question by regressing vote choice on voters’ attributes, interpreting changes in coefficient magnitude across elections as shifts in support. We show, how- ever, that this analysis fails to take into account the prevalence of the group in the electorate and the rate that group turns out to vote — yielding quantities that are not directly useful for understanding election outcomes. To avoid this base-rate fallacy, we introduce a set of tools for estimating where candidates received votes and how voting bloc patterns differ from prior elections. We apply these tools to study US elections, demonstrating that there is little evidence that Black and Hispanic voters shifted to Republicans in the 2020 election and that Donald Trump’s support was concentrated among voters with moderate attitudes towards racial outgroups.
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