ESRA 2027 sessions by theme

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Session Details

Attitudes toward ethnic and religious minorities shape intergroup relations and public support for inclusion. Yet such attitudes may reflect both general dispositions and group-specific perceptions, raising questions about how their meanings, determinants, and expressions vary across target groups, social and political contexts, and time.
This session brings together survey research on the measurement, comparison, and explanation of attitudes toward minorities. It aims to connect research traditions that often focus on particular groups or forms of prejudice, including antisemitism, anti-Muslim prejudice, racism, and attitudes toward immigrants and refugees. Contributions may examine negative attitudes and social distance as well as acceptance, solidarity, and support for equal rights.
We understand comparison broadly, encompassing comparisons across countries and social contexts, across majority and minority respondent populations, between different target groups, and over time. We particularly welcome contributions addressing one or more of the following topics:
• Common and group-specific dimensions of minority attitudes and prejudice, and their implications for theory, conceptualization, and measurement;
• The role of value and ideological orientations, religiosity, social positions, perceived threats, intergroup contact, and other individual- or contextual-level mechanisms in explaining attitudes;
• Stability and change in in minority attitudes and their determinants in response to societal events, political conflict, and changing public discourse;
• Measurement validity and comparability across groups, contexts, and time, including measurement invariance, social desirability, and questionnaire design.
We welcome substantive and methodological contributions using cross-sectional or longitudinal surveys, survey experiments, or survey data linked to contextual or other data sources. Single-country studies are equally welcome when they contribute to the session’s comparative questions. The aim is to advance understanding of when attitudes toward different minorities reflect shared underlying mechanisms and when they are shaped by group- and context-specific processes, while strengthening the empirical basis for valid comparisons and substantive explanantion.