Popular Support for Pro-assimilation Policies

• In Event: Poster Session: Intergroup Dynamics and Tolerance & Representation and Electoral Systems
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Intergroup Dynamics and Tolerance

Abstract

Assimilating minorities has been a common strategy in state-building across various historical and contemporary contexts. State elites are often driven by multiple motivations to enforce such policies. These motivations range from the desire to forge a unified national identity (Gellner, 1983), to achieve certain economic objectives, or to suppress and eradicate cultural differences perceived as threats to the established order (Beissinger, 2009). The underlying assumption is that homogeneity in language, customs, and beliefs within a state can minimize the grounds for internal conflicts. This approach is particularly appealing to new or fragile nations as a means to quickly ensure stability and coherence.

Examples of assimilationist exist throughout history and in contemporary times. In terms of historical examples, we need to look no further than the 'boarding school' or 'residential school' systems found in Canada or here in the US against indigenous peoples. In contemporary contexts, such policies continue to manifest in various regions of the world. A striking example is found in China, particularly in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, or the treatment of Kurds across multiple states. Even in industrialized democracies such as France and Denmark, policies that encourage minority ‘integration’ into dominant group norms and language, often come at the expense of minorities preserving their own norms and culture.

While the burgeoning literature on assimilation has spent considerable time investigating the role of the state and elite incentives (Carter, 2022; MacDonald, 2012) in variations in the degrees and intensity of assimilation, little attention has been paid to bottom-up demands for assimilation. This oversight suggests an implicit assumption that these policies must have some popular support, or at least passive acceptance, among the general population. The idea is that for such policies to be sustained over time, they cannot solely be the product of top-down enforcement but must resonate, to some degree, with societal beliefs and attitudes. This aspect raises critical questions about the role of public opinion in legitimizing and perpetuating these practices. It indicates a possible alignment, whether active or passive, between state-driven assimilation policies and the prevailing societal norms or prejudices against minority groups. Understanding this dynamic is crucial for comprehending not only the mechanics of forced assimilation but also the broader social and cultural contexts that enable these policies to take root and persist."of theoretical and empirical work on public opinion regarding the forced assimilation of minorities. This paper aims to bridge this gap by introducing a formal model that intertwines insights from social psychology and behavioral economics: the social identity theory (Tajfel, 1981; Tajfel, n.d.) and the concept of selective memory (Benabou, 2015; Benabou, 2023; Fudenberg, 2022). In the model, a.) individuals are uncertain about the true value of their national identity, but observations of how others express their identities provide information on the value of one's own identity; b.) pro-assimilation policies are costly but provide incentives for outgroup members to assimilate.; c.) individuals can selectively ignore or avoid information (‘selective memory’) on the degree of prevailing pro-assimilation policy.

A key empirical implication can be summarized as follows: Increased uncertainty of the dominant group about the value of their identity leads to higher levels of assimilation demand and incentives to engage in selective memory. This is because weaker initial beliefs about identity are more significantly updated when confronted with new evidence, as a direct implication of Bayes’ Rule.

Interestingly, this implication provides an alternative explanation to threat-based accounts on when dominant group members demand assimilation (Blalock, 1967; Stephan and Stephan, 2000). Rather than dominant group members feeling threatened directly from group status difference narrowing or with the minority group growing in size, such demands arise when dominant group members are uncertain about the value of their identity. Consequently, the drive for assimilation by the dominant group emerges not primarily from a place of fear or competition with minority groups, but from a deep-seated uncertainty about their own identity. This uncertainty makes them more susceptible to altering their beliefs about identity, leading to a stronger insistence on the assimilation of minority groups.

Lastly, I am currently fielding a survey experiment to test these key implications of the model on respondents from the United States and China and would present preliminary results at the conference.

Author

• Tak-Huen Chau, UC Berkeley