Political Elite Discourses and Majority Members’ Beliefs About the Prevalence of Ethnic Discrimination in Europe

Abstract This article investigates European majority members’ perceptions of the prevalence of ethnic discrimination. We use individual-level data from the Eurobarometer ‘Discrimination in the EU’ series, covering 26 European countries and six years (2006, 2008, 2009, 2012, 2015, and 2019), enriched with contextual information on political elite discourses from the Comparative Manifesto Project. We shed light on significant and substantive cross-country and cross-temporal variations in these perceptions. Next, we explore how these variations are related to national political elite discourses by employing multilevel models. By disentangling between and within country variations, we find that particularly changes in political elite discourses within countries over time are associated with variations in majority members’ beliefs about the prevalence of ethnic discrimination in their society. Exclusive discourses, which emphasize nationalistic ideas and demarcate strong boundaries between ethnic groups, are associated with majority members thinking that ethnic discrimination is less widespread in their country. The reverse holds for inclusive discourses: when political elites underline the importance of cultural diversity and multiculturalism, majorities perceive more ethnic discrimination. While these discourses are only related to within country variations, our descriptive and multilevel results show that the national context matters for majorities’ perceptions of the prevalence of ethnic discrimination.