The prejudice first model and foreign policy values: racial and religious bias among conservatives and liberals
| Published date | 01 March 2021 |
| Author | Richard Hanania,Robert Trager |
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066120930801 |
Original Article
The prejudice first model
and foreign policy values:
racial and religious bias
among conservatives
and liberals
Richard Hanania
Columbia University, USA
Robert Trager
UCLA, USA
Abstract
Scholars who study public opinion and American foreign policy have accepted what
Rathbun et al. (2016) call the “Vertical Hierarchy Model,” which says that policy attitudes
are determined by more abstract moral ideas about right and wrong. This article turns
this idea on its head by introducing the Prejudice First Model, arguing that foreign policy
preferences and orientations are driven by attitudes toward the groups being affected by
specific policies. Three experiments are used to test the utility of this framework. First,
when conservatives heard about Muslims killing Christians, as opposed to the opposite
scenario, they were more likely to support a humanitarian intervention and agree that
the United States has a moral obligation to help those persecuted by their governments.
Liberals showed no religious preference. When the relevant identity group was race,
however, liberals were more likely to want to help blacks persecuted by whites, while
conservatives showed no racial bias. In contrast, the degree of persecution mattered
relatively little to respondents in either experiment, and the effects of moral foundations
were shown to be generally weak relative to those of prejudice. In another experiment,
conservatives adopted more isolationist policies after reading a text about the country
becoming more liberal, as opposed to a paragraph that said the United States was a rel-
atively conservative country. While not necessarily contradicting the Vertical Hierarchy
Model, the resultsindicate that under most conditionsthe Prejudice First Model presentsa
better lens through which to understand how foreign policy preferences are formed.
Corresponding author:
Richard Hanania, Columbia University, 116th St & Broadway, New York, NY 10027-6902, USA.
Email: rh2947@columbia.edu
European Journal of
International Relations
2021, Vol. 27(1) 204–231
ªThe Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1354066120930801
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejt
E
JR
I
Keywords
Foreign policy, political psychology, prejudice, moral foundations, survey methods, moral
psychology
Introduction
In late 2015, France suffered a wave of coordinated terrorist attacks that left 130 dead
and hundreds more injured. In response, Facebook created an option that allowed people
to change their profile photos to a picture of the French flag, and many Americans and
Europeans took advantage of this feature. While the company may not have imagined
that it would face a backlash over such a well-meaning gesture, critics accused Facebook
of racism (McHugh, 2015). After all, there had been recent terrorist attacks that killed
dozens or hundreds in countries such as Kenya, Pakistan, and Lebanon, and yet none of
these events had elicited similar reactions.
While this recent episode may seem trivial, it reflects a fundamental truth about
international politics that is easily overlooked. Westerners tend to care more about
terrorist attacks in countries where the people are ethnically or culturally similar to
themselves. Likewise, the Muslim world takes a disproportionate interest in the suffering
of the Palestinians, while Russia concerns itself with the fate of its coethnics in neigh-
boring states. Although these kinds of prejudices clearly play an important role in
international politics, Western countries such as the United States pride themselves on
their supposed adherence to universal values. Yet even Americans and Britons are more
likely to perceive a threat from a potential adversary when the country in question is
culturally distant (Johns and Davies, 2012; Tomz and Weeks, 2013, 2018).
Previous work has generally looked at foreign policy preferences through the per-
spective of what Rathbun et al. (2016) call the Vertical Hierarchy Model. In this view,
the policy orientations and concrete preferences that political scientists are interested in
are driven by more fundamental ideas of right and wrong. While this perspective is
compelling, much less attention has been paid to the possibility that the prejudices that
have been so extensively studied in the domestic context (e.g. Kinder and Sears, 1981;
Tesler, 2012) are also pivotal in determining how Americans want to interact with the
rest of the world. Research shows that political preferences are driven not only by
abstract moral values (Haidt, 2012; Hanania, 2019; Rathbun et al., 2016), but also by
prejudice toward individuals and groups (Baum and Groeling, 2009; Henry et al., 2004).
It is surprising, then, that despite a large literature on the moral foundations of foreign
policy preferences (Holsti, 2009; Hurwitz and Peffley, 1987; Kertzer et al., 2014), there
has been relatively little experimental work addressing the possibility that the role of
prejudice may be as extensive in foreign policy as it is in the domestic sphere.
This article presents the Prejudice First Model in investigating under what conditions
Americans of different ideologies become more or less willing to intervene for huma-
nitarian reasons. In the first experiment, the relevant dimension of identity is religion,
while in the second experiment, we vary the races of the oppressors and the oppressed.
Finally, the article addresses the possible causes of an isolationist foreign policy
orientation among Americans from the perspective of the Prejudice First Model. Thus,
Hanania and Trager 205
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