books

Native Bias: Overcoming Discrimination Against Immigrants

Studies in Political Behavior Series, Princeton University Press
Best Book Award, Experimental Research Section, APSA 2023

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In the aftermath of the refugee crisis caused by conflicts in the Middle East and an increase in migration to Europe, European nations have witnessed a surge in discrimination targeted at immigrant minorities. To quell these conflicts, some governments have resorted to the adoption of coercive assimilation polices aimed at erasing differences between natives and immigrants. Are these policies the best method for reducing hostilities? Native Bias challenges the premise of such regulations by making the case for a civic integration model, based on shared social ideas defining the concept and practice of citizenship.

Drawing from original surveys, survey experiments, and novel field experiments, Donghyun Danny Choi, Mathias Poertner, and Nicholas Sambanis show that although prejudice against immigrants is often driven by differences in traits such as appearance and religious practice, the suppression of such differences does not constitute the only path to integration. Instead, the authors demonstrate that similarities in ideas and value systems can serve as the foundation for a common identity, based on a shared concept of citizenship, overcoming the perceived social distance between native and immigrants.

Addressing one of the most pressing challenges of our time, Native Bias offers an original framework for understanding anti-immigrant discrimination and the processes through which it can be overcome.

Endorsements

“Native Bias offers a compelling and hopeful analysis of the challenges facing countries grappling with increasing cultural diversity. Focusing on the integration of Muslims in Germany, a series of clever experiments reveals what it takes for majorities to stop discriminating against minorities. Indispensable reading for anyone interested in immigrant integration and multicultural politics!”— Rafaela M. Dancygier, author of Dilemmas of Inclusion: Muslims in European Politics

“This excellent book addresses one of the most important issues of our time: how to overcome the discrimination of immigrants and, ultimately, how to secure their successful integration into new societies. This is a major contribution not only to the study of immigrant discrimination and integration, but also to intergroup relations more broadly.”― Peter Thisted Dinesen, University of Copenhagen

“Setting a new standard for theoretically guided fieldwork, Native Bias presents an array of elegant experiments staged in dozens of cities and involving thousands of bystanders. These unobtrusive studies of discrimination do more than simply document the fact that natives look down on immigrants; they illuminate the conditions under which anti-immigrant discrimination diminishes, underscoring in particular the importance of challenging stereotypes that portray immigrants as hostile or indifferent to the values of the native majority.”— Donald P. Green, Columbia University

“This is a terrific book―one of the best I’ve read in a long time. Polished, theoretically sophisticated, and logically structured, it brings to bear new evidence and approaches on a critical contemporary topic.”― Daniel N. Posner, University of California, Los Angeles

“Based on an impressive battery of original field experiments and surveys, this work holds a powerful message: bias and discrimination against Muslim immigrants are widespread and persistent in Europe. Native Bias shows that these shortcomings can be overcome by shared civic norms and identities.”― Christian Joppke, University of Bern

Severed Connections: How Intraparty Politics Erodes Representation in Democratic Africa

Juan Linz Prize for best dissertation in the comparative study of democracy and autocracy, APSA 2020 (Under Review)

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Why has democracy so often failed to align politics with the will of the governed? Why do a few elected representatives cultivate intense engagement with their constituents while most others drift into indifference? At a moment when democratic discontent is soaring and many democracies appear to be teetering on the brink, Severed Connections provides a new answer. It argues that a core driver of this failure is found not at the ballot box but within the hidden world of intraparty politics, where the fate of democratic representation is often decided long before any votes are cast. In young democracies, this process is shaped by the party leader, the figure at the apex of the national party hierarchy. Their power to grant or deny a place on the ballot is the central mechanism of control—an authority so profound it can make or break political careers and fundamentally shape the incentives legislators carry into office.

This power, however, is not exercised in a vacuum. It is constrained by a fundamental dilemma that every leader must navigate: a clash between two conflicting imperatives. Leaders face the electoral objective—the need to nominate popular, constituent-focused candidates to win elections—which is in constant tension with the control objective: the need to maintain internal discipline and prevent those same popular figures from amassing an independent power base that could challenge their own authority.

To resolve this tension, party leaders adopt a two-pronged strategy dictated by the political geography of the constituency. In competitive districts, the external threat of losing forces them to favor constituency-oriented candidates who are best positioned to win. In their party strongholds, however, where victory is all but assured, the control objective takes precedence, and leaders are free to reward stalwart loyalists whose primary orientation is inward toward the party, not outward toward their constituents. This strategic selection produces two distinct types of representatives, each carrying a different set of incentives into office. Legislators from competitive seats are incentivized to invest in visible constituency service, while those from safe seats channel their efforts inward, demonstrating fealty to the party leadership. The striking gap in responsiveness that citizens observe is, therefore, the predictable by-product of this deliberate and strategic candidate selection process.

The empirical focus of this book is Kenya, a relatively new democracy grappling with the dual challenge—chronic dissatisfaction regarding the quality of representation and stagnant levels of institutional trust towards political parties, characteristic of much of Democratic Africa. I explore my argument primarily through a study of two major Kenyan political parties between 2013 and 2017 and apply the framework to shadow cases from both within Africa and outside of it, including Zambia and South Korea.

Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork in Kenya, this book combines insights from qualitative interviews with more than 100 current and former representatives, participant observation in party meetings, and the analyses of archival documents of internal party statutes and regulations, novel quantitative data on representative behavior, and a series of surveys and experiments on likely primary voters. This distinctly multi-method approach allows me to delineate the calculus of party leaders and representatives, elucidate the precise logic of how party leaders come to exercise control over the behavior of representatives, elaborate on the institutional and voter-side mechanisms of how party leaders are able to obtain these goals, and the impact of these within-party machinations on the nature of representation.

Severed Connections make several contributions to our understanding of political parties and representation in new democracies more broadly. Scholars have long traced the Global South’s representational deficit to the weakness of political parties, implying that as parties institutionalize and partisan attachments deepen, effective representation will naturally follow. My argument, however, suggests otherwise: without concomitant changes to how power and authority are configured within political parties, political parties can corrode the representational link between politicians and their constituents even as they become increasingly institutionalized.

It also provides an opportunity to refine and extend our understanding of the inner workings of political parties, which has seldom been the subject of systematic inquiry outside of the consolidated democracies. It sheds light on the incentives and interests of key actors within the party and how these incentives structure their interaction within party institutions and decision-making processes, often referred to as the “black box’” or “secret garden” of politics. The centrality of the candidate selection process in shaping the power configurations within parties highlighted in this book is reminiscent of the well-cited aphorism by E. E. Schattschneider that “He who can make the nomination is the owner of the party.”

But perhaps most importantly, this book provides us with important clues regarding the conditions necessary to improve the quality of democracy in new democracies. Many reform efforts to improve accountability and governance in these contexts center around harnessing procedural justice (such as free and fair elections and a guarantee of civil and political liberties) or voter-side interventions to ease voters’ informational constraints or enhance citizens’ understanding of democratic processes. By contrast, the theoretical framework and findings in this book show that for democracy to fulfill its most important goal of democratic representation, due attention must be directed toward political parties. Only when political parties internalize the values promoted by democracy can they function as vehicles of democratic representation.