On July 24, Professor Charels Crabtree of Dept. of Government, Dartmouth College will give a talk entitled “A Backlash to International Refugee Law: Evidence from Survey Experiment in Turkey and the United States” Professor Atsushi Tago of the School of Political Science and Economics is hosting the event with the support from the Center for Positive/Empirical Analysis of Political Economy, Top Global University Project at Waseda University.
“CROP-IT (Collaborative Research On Political Information Transmission) ” is funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
Abstract
How do international laws and norms affect citizens’ willingness to accept refugees? In full and partial democracies, citizens’ attitudes can influence national policy on refugees across several dimensions: whether and how many the country accepts, and how they are treated once they arrive. And a growing literature suggests international institutions can influence these citizen attitudes on different foreign policy questions, but those studies are almost entirely confined to U.S.- based respondents, and none consider refugee policy. Using a survey experiment administered in September 2017 via 1335 face-to-face interviews with Turkish citizens, we investigate how different international norms affect citizens’ willingness to accept refugees. Our findings are surprising: reminding people about the government’s responsibility under the Refugee Convention to accept refugees decreases support for accepting them. This effect is driven by less educated respondents and those who support the nationalist-populist incumbent party. We replicate this result in independent work in the United States. Taken together, our results suggest that international refugee law in particular — and perhaps international institutions generally — can sometimes trigger political backlash that undermines the very policies they promote.
Outline
- Title: A Backlash to International Refugee Law: Evidence from Survey Experiment in Turkey and the United States
- Date & Time: Wed. July 24, 2019 at 14：45-16：15
- Place: Room 701, 7F of Building 3, Waseda Campus
- Presenter: Charles Crabtree, Dept. of Government, Dartmouth College
- Contact: Atsushi Tago, Faculty of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University [email protected]
- Co-sponsor: TGU Positive/Empirical Analysis of Political Economy, Waseda University; WINPEC Experiments in Political Science Research Group
- Flyer
