Replication Data for Voted In, Standing Out: Public Response to Immigrants' Political Accession

How do dominant-group natives react to immigrants' political integration? We argue that ethnic minority immigrants winning political office makes natives feel threatened, triggering animosity. We test this dynamic across the 2010--2019 UK general elections, using hate crime police records, public opinion data, and text data from over 500,000 regional and local newspaper articles. While past work has not established a causal relationship between minorities' political power gains and dominant group animosity, we identify natives' hostile reactions with a regression discontinuity design that leverages close election results between immigrant-origin ethnic minority and dominant-group candidates. We find that minority victories increase hate crimes by 67%, exclusionary attitudes by 66%, and negative media coverage of immigrant groups by 110%. Consistent with power threat and social identity theories, these findings demonstrate a strong and widespread negative reaction---encompassing a violence-prone fringe and the mass public---against ethnic minority immigrants' integration into majority settings.

占主导地位族群的本土民众对移民的政治融入会作何反应？我们提出，少数族裔移民当选公职会令本土民众感受到威胁，进而引发敌意。我们依托2010年至2019年英国大选的相关数据，结合仇恨犯罪警方记录、民意调查数据，以及超过50万篇区域与地方报纸的文本数据，对这一作用机制进行检验。过往研究尚未厘清少数族裔政治权力增益与主导族群敌意之间的因果关联，我们则借助移民出身少数族裔与本土族群候选人之间的竞选胶着结果，采用断点回归设计（Regression Discontinuity Design）识别出本土民众的敌对反应。我们发现，少数族裔候选人胜选会使仇恨犯罪率上升67%、民众排外态度增加66%，同时针对移民群体的负面媒体报道量增长110%。结合权力威胁理论与社会认同理论，本研究结果显示，少数族裔移民融入多数族群主导的社会环境会引发强烈且广泛的负面反应——这一反应既涵盖了易滋生暴力的边缘群体，也覆盖了普通大众。