Hate in Context

Week 6: Political Elites and Hate Crime · LENS preview

Violeta Haas

Department of Political Science

School of Social Sciences and Philosophy

Trinity College Dublin

Updates

Strike

  • Industrial action ongoing, but Wednesday’s class takes place
  • Fairness cut stays: Dancygier (2023) no longer required
  • If time allows, I’ll show some of the Dancygier findings

Position paper

  • Apologies for the delay in returning these
  • First batch has been released
  • Second batch coming today
  • Next batch by Wednesday

This Week

  1. Catch-up: Riaz, Bischof & Wagner (2024)
  2. Theoretical backdrop
  3. Zonszein & Grossman (2025)

Riaz, Bischof & Wagner (2024)

Overview

  • Research question: Do local immigrant-attributed crimes raise hate crimes against refugees?
  • Y: daily probability/count of hate crimes against refugees
  • X: immigrant-attributed crime event
  • Theory: vicarious retribution, i.e., natives retaliate against uninvolved out-group members after a triggering crime
  • Design: regression discontinuity in time (RDiT) around local crime events (Germany, 2015–2019)

Wait… RDiT? That sounds familiar!

Regression Discontinuity in Time (RDiT) design

Idea: a sudden local shock is a cutoff in time. Compare hate crimes from the before period vs the after period.

Comparison around local crime events

Same county, days close to the event

RDiT design: compare hate crimes before vs after immigrant-attributed crime, excluding day 0

Scope conditions

[discussed in class]

How do natives (including potential hate crime perpetrators) hear about immigrant-attributed crime in their locality?

[discussed in class]

[discussed in class]

Findings: daily hate-crime rate around events

Riaz et al. 2024 Figure 2: Daily rate of hate crimes in the two weeks before and after an immigrant crime event

Hate crimes surge locally right after immigrant-attributed crimes but spike fades within ~4 days, consistent with an emotional trigger (affect).

Findings: where the backlash is stronger

Riaz et al. 2024 Figure 3: Heterogeneous LATE estimates by AfD strength and foreign-population context

Backlash is stronger where far-right mobilization potential is high and where the foreign population has recently increased, not simply where many foreigners already live.

Anything else that didn’t convince you?

Theoretical backdrop

Discussion: social identity theory

In groups of 3-4 (≈5 min):

  1. What does social identity theory say?
  2. Social identity theory has three components: categorization, identification, and comparison. What does each mean?
  3. When people belong to a devalued/low-status group, what coping strategies can they use?

Social identity theory

[discussed in class]

Coping with low group status

[discussed in class]

Group discussion

In groups of 3-4:

  1. What is the difference between descriptive and substantive representation?
  2. What are ways to increase descriptive and substantive representation?
  3. Can a politician descriptively represent a group without substantively representing it (or vice versa)? Give an example.

Descriptive vs substantive representation

[discussed in class]

Example

[discussed in class]

Zonszein & Grossman (2025)

Overview

How do natives react when immigrant-origin minorities win political office?

What informational cues are natives supposed to receive when a minority candidate is elected?

[discussed in class]

Which actors’ reactions are Zonszein & Grossman (2024) looking at and which outcome corresponds to which actor?

[discussed in class]

Design: another regression discontinuity

Setting: UK general elections, 2010–2019 (England & Wales)

Idea: near a razor-thin election, who wins is as-good-as-random. Compare places just above vs just below the win cutoff.

Schematic of close-election regression discontinuity: jump in outcome at victory margin zero

What we estimate is a LATE (local average treatment effect): the average causal effect at the cutoff, i.e., for places with close races ≠ effect for all elections, i.e., landslide elections.

Findings on hate crimes (perpetrators)

Zonszein and Grossman 2025 Figure 1: minority victory effects on hate crime

≈ +67% hate crimes (3 months post-election) relative to barely-losing minority constituencies.

Findings on attitudes (mass public)

Zonszein and Grossman Figure 2: minority victory and exclusionary attitudes

≈ +66% more exclusionary immigration attitudes

Why would the media report negatively about minorities?

Two reasons

[discussed in class]

Findings on media coverage (media/elites)

Zonszein and Grossman Figure 3: minority victory and negative media coverage

≈ +110% more negative coverage of the relevant immigrant group

Concentrated in right-wing and smaller-circulation papers

Neighbor discussion (≈3–4 min)

Turn to a neighbor:

  1. Does this mean descriptive representation produces backlash?
  2. Why is the alternative explanation of reporting increases particularly important to rule out here?
  3. Do natives respond to all winning minority candidates the same way?

[discussed in class]

[discussed in class]

[discussed in class]

Implication: the paradox of political integration

Like Dancygier et al. (2022), who show that social integration into dating/marriage markets triggered hostility, Zonszein & Grossman (2025) show that integrating into political institutions can produce backlash.

Integration success ≠ automatically less hate crime. Sometimes the success is the trigger.

But: only first-time minority wins

Zonszein and Grossman Appendix Figure G.10b: hate-crime effects shrink when controlling for prior minority MP history

Effect concentrated in constituencies electing a minority MP for the first time

Critique?

Who do these results apply to?

Only places in razor-thin races at the win threshold — not landslides, and not every constituency that elects a minority MP.