In Western democracies, the political left and the right don’t have much in common. What they do share, according to a new study led by an international consortium, is a disturbing stereotype. Research just published in the British Journal of Political Science reveals that both sides of the political spectrum in the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Germany, countries that are usually considered to be inclusive, believe that Muslims are a threat to the LGBTQ community (read journal article here.)
Embedded in the debate over immigration policies, this bias is seen as pervasive and far-reaching – and overlooked. Alberto López Ortega, one of three lead researchers on the study, confirmed what he called the “counterintuitive” findings of the study, which used an innovative approach to survey more than 5,500 participants.
Traditionally, explained López Ortega, the two political opposites have held opposing viewpoints, supporting their conflicting approaches to immigration. The right, he elaborated, usually argue that immigrants have drastically different values than those of the host country at large and therefore must be kept out. The left, on the other hand, more often propose what López Ortega called “an integration narrative.”
In other words, “the idea is that natives can convince immigrants of their value system, and that they can adopt their values,” said López Ortega, who serves as this year’s Ramón Areces Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) at Harvard University and is an assistant professor of political science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
However, in their new study, López Ortega and his co-authors Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte (University of Southampton) and Michael Hunklinger (University of Amsterdam) found that the belief that Muslims pose a threat to LGBTQ+ individuals is widespread across the political spectrum. While the prevalence of this stereotype varies slightly by country –70.3 percent in Germany, 65.6 percent in the Netherlands, 60.7 percent in the UK, and 58.3 percent in the United States – the key finding is that this perception is not confined to the right. Instead, it is consistently held by majorities on both the left and right, challenging the assumption that concerns over liberal values and immigration are strictly a right-wing phenomenon.
“The Netherlands is really a laboratory of what ends up happening in other countries,” said López Ortega. He cites the emergence there of “far right gay politicians” (such as Pim Fortuyn) in the early 2000s, when the country experimented with a kind of “homonationalism” that claimed it wanted to protect a vulnerable population, aka the LGBTQ community. “These are narratives that use the rights of women and rights of LGBTQ people as a justification for their anti-immigration narratives,” he said.
At play on the left, said López Ortega, is an “accommodation strategy” that has pulled the political left toward the right’s anti-immigrant approach. “We see the far right winning in different countries,” he said. This tempts some social democratic parties and even, he continued, green parties to “fall into the temptation of buying into some of this rhetoric and saying, ‘Maybe we were wrong in the past when we were defending immigrants.’ “We see this in Germany, where the left is falling into anti-immigration narratives to stop losing voters – though research suggests this strategy actually backfires.”
The study also revealed structural differences that have likely played into the Netherlands and Germany showing more bias. Both countries, López Ortega explained, have multi-party systems where fringe ideas can have more impact. In the Netherlands and, to a lesser extent Germany, “if you're a small party and you want to try out a different argument, you can get past the threshold and be a significant party very easily.” In the Netherlands, for example, there are up to fifteen parties in the national parliament. “It’s extremely fragmented politics,” said López Ortega. The fact that the UK and the United States are basically two-party systems “makes it hard to bring in these new ideas, even if they end up arriving, as is the case in these two countries.”
Because people rarely admit to bias, the researchers had to use a more subtle approach to uncover it. “We're trying to reveal attitudes that people may be unwilling to express openly,” explained López Ortega. To do this, instead of directly asking participants whether they saw Muslim people as a threat to LGBTQ+ individuals, his team used a numbered list of potential threats. Each participant was asked to select how many of the listed groups they saw as a threat – but without specifying which ones.
Participants were divided into two groups. Both groups received a list that included a mix of obvious and less obvious threats (such as “hooligans” or “school bullies”). The key difference was that only one group’s list also included “Muslim people” as a potential threat.
By comparing the average number of threats selected by each group, the researchers could infer whether participants perceived Muslims as a threat. “If the group that had ‘Muslim people’ on their list selected a higher number of threats on average, that suggests they saw Muslims as a threat – because otherwise, both groups should have reported similar numbers,” López Ortega explained.
Although the use of this technique to measure ethnic stereotypes, the bias may not be. “Very likely they were agreeing on many things regarding stereotypes before now, but we just don't have the data to show this,” concluded López Ortega. “We didn't have the type of experiments to show this.”
The bias hits close to home for López Ortega. “I'm gay myself and an immigrant. I’m now here in this country, and I was living in the Netherlands when I started with this research,” he said, noting that before then, he had lived in Switzerland. “This has to do with me and the people that I love.”
What he sees is frightening. “Anything that constitutes what we would denominate democratic liberal values is up for grabs in terms of being used strategically only against minorities,” he concluded. “At the end of the day, it's really about building and working on the idea of threat – a long-standing staple in the playbook of illiberal actors.”
