A Nationalist Backlash to International Refugee Law: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Turkey

Abstract

How do international laws affect citizens’ willingness to accept refugees? In full and partial democracies, citizens’ attitudes can influence national policy on accepting refugees. A growing literature suggests international institutions can influence citizens’ attitudes on foreign policy issues, but those studies are almost entirely confined to domestic human rights and U.S.-based respondents; none consider refugee policy. Using data from a survey experiment administered in September 2017 via face-to-face interviews with 1335 Turkish citizens, we investigate how international norms affect citizens’ willingness to accept refugees. Our findings are surprising: reminding people about the government’s responsibility under the Refugee Convention to accept refugees triggers a backfire effect, decreasing support for accepting them. This effect appears driven by respondents who support the nationalist-populist incumbent party and by lower-educated respondents. We therefore provide evidence that international refugee law – and perhaps international institutions generally – can trigger a political backlash, undermining the very policies that they promote.

Ideological bias in constitutional judgments: Experimental analysis and potential solutions

“…The intergroup effect remained significant even after employing an incentive to select the ruling best supported by the legal evidence. Likewise, Cope and Crabtree (2020) found that attitudes toward the implementation of international human rights were driven by the political‐party affiliation. Sulitzeanu‐Kenan et al (2016) show that ideological preferences strongly influence legal expert's judgments regarding the proportionality of hypothetical scenarios describing targeted killings of terrorists (Sulitzeanu‐Kenan et al, 2016).…”

Use of Experimental Methods in the Field of Migration Studies

“…Türkiye'de yürütülen deneysel göç çalışmalarına bakıldığında ise, Türkiye sahasında göç konusunu deneysel yöntemler aracılığıyla araştıran çalışmaların özellikle 2015 yılı sonrasında arttığı görülmektedir. Bu çalışmalar yerli halkın göç politikası tercihleri (Cope ve Crabtree, 2020;Vrânceanu vd., 2021), göç etme niyetleri (Gevrek vd., 2021) ve göçmenlere karşı tutumları (Getmansky vd., 2018(Getmansky vd., , 2020Lazarev ve Sharma, 2017) gibi konuların yanı sıra mültecilerin geri dönme kararları (Husein ve Wagner, 2020) ve barış süreçlerine ilişkin tercihleri (Fabbe vd., 2017) gibi konulara odaklanmaktadır. Ancak Türkiye'de yürütülen deneysel göç çalışmalarının yalnızca küçük bir kısmının Türkiye'deki üniversitelerde ve devlet kurumlarında görev yapan araştırmacılar tarafından yürütüldüğü de dikkat çekmektedir.…”