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Overview
From one closed door to another: cumulative discrimination and prejudice against marginalised groups in Europe
EqualStrength is a Horizon Europe project funded by the European Union. This research project investigates cumulative and structural forms of discrimination, outgroup prejudice and hate crimes against ethnic, racial and religious minorities. EqualStrength is led by a consortium of ten European research institutions.
Ethnic, racial and religious minorities experience discriminatory behaviour and prejudicial attitudes in multiple life domains, which accumulates across the life course. This continuous exposure perpetuates minorities’ subordinate position across generations. The main contribution of EqualStrength is to investigate cumulative and structural forms of discrimination, outgroup prejudice and hate crimes against ethnic, racial and religious minorities from a cross-setting and intersectional perspective. We deploy innovative, targetted and effective methods, which include field experiments, population-level secondary survey data, meso-level policy analysis and targeted data collection to include the perspective of minority groups who directly confront discrimination.
Project objectives
Objectives and ambition
EqualStrength takes as a point of departure that ethnic, racial and religious inequalities are reciprocally related across multiple settings, mutually reinforcing, and exacerbating over time (Blank, 2005). The interwoven character of differential treatment by ethnicity, race or religion has been coined by Reskin (2012, p. 19) as “über (or meta) discrimination”. Previous research, however, has mainly examined direct discrimination in a single setting at a specific moment in time and often from an individual (and typically male) perspective. Already twenty-five years ago, Bonilla-Silva’s (1997) seminal ‘Rethinking racism’ asserted that racism is systemic and structural. Yet, mainstream approaches in sociology, economics and social psychology still predominantly equate racism to hostile attitudes or beliefs operating at the individual level (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), largely neglecting the racialized structures that maintain and reproduce power imbalances between groups. While recent contributions emphasised subtler forms of prejudice, such as symbolic and modern racism, (e.g. Dovidio et al., 2017; Esses, 2021), research that takes a multi-domain perspective to explain outgroup hostility is scant. As a result, structural racism as experienced by victims is underestimated, and our understanding of its institutionalised patterning across life domains remains limited.
EqualStrength adopts a cross-setting perspective on cumulative disadvantage to study structural and institutional discrimination and outgroup hostility across key life domains, including employment, housing, access to public services such as childcare, and leisure settings. In parallel, we study how people understand and cope with episodes of discrimination and microaggressions in their everyday lives. Our approach builds on scholarly work that studies perceptions of discrimination (Barreto & Ellemers, 2015), but overlooked the psychological consequences of continuous exposure to systemic discrimination and microaggressions. Understanding the victims’ experiences of discrimination based on race, ethnicity or religion across life domains is also crucial from an intersectional perspective, as episodes of unequal treatment take very different forms depending on people’s gender, sexual orientation, or social background (Harnois & Ifatunji, 2011; Pedulla, 2014, 2018). Concretely, we seek to address five interrelated research objectives:
- To capture structural forms of ethnic and racial discrimination in the domains of employment, housing and access to childcare. We focus on the most stigmatised ethnic minorities in the European context: Muslims, Roma and black immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa.
- To examine the systemic nature of prejudice and hate crime across life domains (with a particular focus on anti-migrant, anti-Muslim, anti-Black and anti-Roma attitudes).
- To analyse the role of policy and institutional factors in minority groups’ exposure to structural discrimination, prejudice and hate crime, which allows evidence-based policy recommendations to mitigate discrimination in childcare, housing and employment.
- To document the lived experiences of minority groups (with a particular focus on Muslim, Roma and black minorities) and the coping strategies they adopt to deal with everyday discrimination and microaggressions.
- To analyse the experiences and consequences of discrimination and prejudice from an intersectional perspective, focusing on how race, ethnicity and religion intersect with gender and socioeconomic position to produce unequal outcomes.
The conceptual framework of EqualStrength focuses on ethnic minorities and examines their exposure to systematic discrimination and structural racism across multiple settings. We look especially at highly marginalised groups: Muslim, black and Roma minorities. In differentiating between settings, we study access to childcare services, employment opportunities and housing as three interrelated life domains. Because discrimination and hostility in one domain may, directly or indirectly, change outcomes and opportunities in other domains, a multi-domain approach can reveal a pattern of cumulative disadvantage and social exclusion over time and across generations, explained in greater detail below. Four work packages (WP2 - WP5) address the structural inequalities that characterise the working, learning and living conditions of minority families by analysing gatekeepers (e.g. employers, landlords and real estate agents, childcare administrators), the society at large, and the perceptions of vulnerable minority groups across different institutional contexts.
Our research design combines strong analytical rigour and conceptual precision with a multi-actor, multi-domain and multi-level focus. We take up the gauntlet of empirically examining structural and intersectional patterns of discrimination, prejudice and hate crime, going beyond the individual-level and single-domain focus of the existing literature. Specifically, our conceptualization and operationalization acknowledge that individuals are exposed to discrimination and forms of outgroup prejudice in multiple domains of life, often simultaneously. Next to overt forms of discrimination and hostility, members of ethnic minorities routinely experience subtler forms of discrimination or are indirectly discriminated by the disparate impact of ostensibly neutral policies or regulations.
Through an innovative and methodologically sophisticated research program, relying on cross-national and cross-setting field experiments, population-based survey experiments and high-quality, cross-national survey data (described below in more detail), we accomplish two goals: (1) develop foundational insight into on how racism, xenophobia and discrimination are institutionalised and made structural in different European societies; and (2) map how institutional discrimination and structural racism impact the wellbeing, living conditions, and policy preferences of people with minority and migrant background across a variety of settings.