Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T02:02:35.975Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Back to “normal”: the short-lived impact of an online NGO campaign of government discrimination in Hungary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2021

Gabor Simonovits Open the ORCID record for Gabor Simonovits [Opens in a new window] ,
Bori Simonovits ,
Adam Vig ,
Peter Hobot ,
Renata Nemeth  and
Gabor Csomor
Gabor Simonovits*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Central European University, Academic Co-director, Rajk College for Advanced Studies, Budapest, Hungary
Bori Simonovits
Affiliation:
Budapest Faculty of Education and Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
Adam Vig
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary
Peter Hobot
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary
Renata Nemeth
Affiliation:
Department of Statistics, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
Gabor Csomor
Affiliation:
Independent Researcher, Budapest, Hungary
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

To what extent can civil rights NGOs protect ethnic minorities against unequal treatment? We study this question by combining an audit experiment of 1260 local governments in Hungary with an intervention conducted in collaboration with a major Hungarian civil rights NGO. In the audit experiment we demonstrated that Roma individuals were about 13 percent-points less likely to receive responses to information requests from local governments, and the responses they received were of substantially lower quality. The intervention that reminded a random subset of local governments of their legal responsibility of equal treatment led to a short-term reduction in their discriminatory behavior, but the effects of the intervention dissipated within a month. These findings suggest that civil rights NGOs might face substantive difficulties in trying to reduce discrimination through simple information campaigns.

Keywords

American politicsexperimental researchfield experimentspolitical psychologypublic opinion
Type
Research Note
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , October 2022 , pp. 848 - 856
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bloom, HS (1995) Minimum detectable effects: a simple way to report the statistical power of experimental designs. Evaluation review 19, 547–556.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, DM and Crabtree, C (2017) Moving beyond measurement: adapting audit studies to test bias-reducing interventions. Journal of Experimental Political Science 4, 57–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coppock, A (2019) Avoiding post-treatment bias in audit experiments. Journal of Experimental Political Science 6, 1–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Distelhorst, G and Hou, Y (2014) Ingroup bias in official behavior: a national field experiment in China. Quarterly Journal of Political Science 9, 203–230.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Einstein, KL and Glick, DM (2017) Does race affect access to government services? An experiment exploring street-level bureaucrats and access to public housing. American Journal of Political Science 61, 100–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fang, AH, Guess, AM and Humphreys, M (2019) Can the government deter discrimination? Evidence from a randomized intervention in New York City. The Journal of Politics 81, 127–141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hemker, J and Rink, A (2017) Multiple dimensions of bureaucratic discrimination: evidence from German welfare offices. American Journal of Political Science 61, 786–803.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kalla, JL and Porter, E (2019) Correcting bias in perceptions of public opinion among American elected officials: results from two field experiments. British Journal of Political Science 51(4), 1792–1800.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krekó, P and Enyedi, Z (2018) Explaining Eastern Europe: Orbán's laboratory of illiberalism. Journal of Democracy 29, 39–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, J, Gounev, P, Pap, AL, Wagman, D, Balogi, A, Bezlov, T, Simonovits, B and Vargha, L (2008) Racism and police stops: adapting US and British debates to continental Europe. European journal of criminology 5, 161–191.10.1177/1477370807087641CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pap, AL (2017) Democratic decline in Hungary: law and society in an illiberal democracy. New York, NY: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simonovits, G, Kezdi, G and Kardos, P (2018) Seeing the world through the other's eye: an online intervention reducing ethnic prejudice. American Political Science Review 112, 186–193.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Simonovits et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KPSCLK
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Simonovits et al. supplementary material

Simonovits et al. supplementary material

Download Simonovits et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 168.7 KB