Visualizing Beliefs in Biological Racial Difference and Ordering across Europe

Abstract

The author plots the proportions of people in 20 European countries who believe in biological racial differences, contributing to debates about the role of race and racism in Europe: whether Europeans think in biological racial terms and whether thinking about racism is an adequate framework in the European context. The main new insight is simply providing concrete empirical evidence that beliefs in biological race are widely spread in Europe. Second, this visualization highlights that ideas about races being born “more hardworking” are a more socially acceptable and widely spread form of belief in racial differences than beliefs in races being born “less intelligent”. Third, it shows how the difference between the two types of biological racial beliefs organizes countries into an east-west axis, whereas no such division is apparent when looking only at the magnitudes of the proportions of people who hold racial beliefs.

Debates among scholars studying race and ethnicity in Europe have often involved the notion that racism in Europe takes on a more cultural understanding. This perspective is often counterposed to the United States, which is believed to take on a more biological understanding of racial difference. Although scholarly debates around this are more nuanced than simply saying that there is no race in Europe (Morning and Maneri 2022), the facts that in most countries (with the exception of the United Kingdom) the word race and racial categories are not commonly used in public speech and that governments do not collect racial statistics (Escafré-Dublet and Simon 2012) have often left researchers who take what Morning and Maneri called a race-conscious approach to grapple with a lack of empirical and analytical tools to study what race and racism look like in Europe. And when these race-conscious researchers make arguments about how race and racism structure European life, they are often met with criticism from the other side that using race in Europe is a form of American cultural imperialism, as race, understood as a biological construct, does not seem to have currency on the continent (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999).

Using data from the European Social Survey, a biannual cross-national survey that records attitudes and opinions on social issues across Europe, I show that beliefs in biological racial difference are still widely held among Europeans in most of the continent. Figure 1 shows the proportions of people who agreed with statements about innate racial differences in each of the 20 European countries surveyed. Specifically, in round 7 of the European Social Survey, respondents were asked whether they believed that some races are born less intelligent than others and whether they believed that some races are born more hardworking than others. Respondents were asked to answer “yes” or “no.” The left panel in Figure 1 shows the proportions of people who answered “yes” to each of these questions. On the left, countries are ordered on the basis of the average proportion of people who answered “yes” across the two questions. The plot shows that although in some countries, such as Sweden and the Netherlands, only very small fractions of people espouse these ideas, in the majority of countries, at least 15 percent (median = 0.147) agree with the existence of innate racial differences in intellect, and at least 41 percent (median = 0.408) agree with the existence of innate racial differences in work ethic.

Figure 1.

Source: Data are from the European Social Survey, round 7 (2014). Proportions and standard errors are estimated using the survey’s design and poststratification weights. Data are publicly available, and code to recreate the figure can be found at GitHub https://github.com/mpnyka/racial-beliefs-europe.

Although both survey items ask about innate, and thus biologically determined, differences across races, one of the most obvious dimensions of variation across countries is the different rates of response for each of these items within countries. The right panel shows the estimated differences across the proportions of people who answered “yes” to each question, with countries where there are larger gaps at the top and countries where the two proportions are almost the same at the bottom. Overall, people in all countries seem more comfortable agreeing with the idea that some races are born more or less hardworking than others. If we presume that both these beliefs stem from a similar latent belief in innate racial differences that classify “races” into better or worse than others, then it is surprising to see that, in some countries, people feel differently about whether it is intelligence or work ethic they are being asked about. In some countries, such as France, only 10 percent of respondents say that they believe in innate racial differences in intelligence, whereas 50 percent agree that there are innate racial differences in how hardworking people are. Meanwhile, in other countries, such as Hungary, similar proportions of people (approximately 35 percent) agree with both statements.

The right panel in Figure 1 orders the countries on the basis of how much accord there is across these two beliefs. Looking at this ordering of the countries, we see that a divide between Western and Eastern Europe emerges. Scholars have long argued that Eastern Europeans tend to espouse more openly racist and ethnonationalist attitudes than Western Europeans (Kohn 1944; Simonsen and Bonikowski 2020). This plot adds another layer of nuance to this east-west divide. Although we can find countries in both Eastern and Western Europe with large shares of their populations who publicly hold beliefs about biological race (see, in the left panel, Portugal and Hungary), most countries in Eastern Europe have smaller differences across the two survey items. For some reason, social norms around racist beliefs in Western countries seem to have moved away from one type of biological race belief (intelligence) but not the other (work ethic), whereas in Eastern Europe they have remained a lot closer together. So perhaps it is not that Western Europeans do not espouse openly racist beliefs but rather that the public norms around what racist beliefs are acceptable are different than in Eastern Europe.

These plots call into question the notion that Europeans do not have a biological understanding of race similar to that of Americans (see Bobo et al. 2012 for a summary of racial beliefs in the United States) and urge race scholars to consider the social desirability impact of the type of racial stereotyping they are inquiring about and how some types of racist beliefs will continue to have social currency at the same time that others might become socially undesirable. Researchers studying race in Europe and in the comparative transatlantic context should take this plot as a baseline understanding of the fact that people in Europe also have clear biological understandings of race and as a jumping board to further investigate in what ways these beliefs regarding the innate superiority of some races might structure social action in other domains of public life, such as hiring, education, and interpersonal relationships.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231231178416 – Supplemental material for Visualizing Beliefs in Biological Racial Difference and Ordering across Europe

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231231178416 for Visualizing Beliefs in Biological Racial Difference and Ordering across Europe by Mireia Triguero Roura in Socius