The Outsider: Prejudice and Politics in Italy

This text combines research methods and analysis to upend many of our assumptions about prejudice. Noting that hostility toward immigrants has been on the rise throughout Western Europe, Paul Sniderman and his team conduct a study of prejudice in Italy and offer insights applicable to nearly all countries worldwide. The study of prejudice, they argue, has been both stimulated and limited by tensions among partial theories. Prejudice and group conflict are said to be rooted in the psychological makeup of individuals, or alternatively, to spring from real competition over material goods or social status, or yet again, to follow in the wake of a quest for identity. It is the distinctive effort of "The Outsider" to develop a unified theory of prejudice integrating personality, realistic conflict and social identity approaches. Drawing on computer-assisted interviewing, this book focuses on Italy partly because it has experienced two different waves of immigration, from Northern Africa and Eastern Europe, and thus allows one to consider to what extent the colour of immigrants' skin imposes a special burden of prejudice.Italy is also an apt site for the study of intolerance because of l

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix Chapter 1. Introduction 3 Chapter 2. The Nature of Prejudice: Race and Nationality as Bases of Conflict 15 Chapter 3. A Theory of Prejudice and Group Conflict 54 Chapter 4. Prejudice and Politics 91 Chapter 5. Conclusion: Intolerance and Democracy 127 Appendix I. Sampling and Weighting 149 Appendix II. Construction of Measures 151 Appendix III. Missing Data 152 Appendix IV. Instrumental Variables 157 Appendix V. Accounting for Measurement Error: An Alternative Estimation of the "Two Flavors" and "Right Shock" Models 160 Appendix VI. The Survey Questionnaire 170 Notes 191 Bibliography 205 Index 213

About the Author :
Paul M. Sniderman is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the author of the widely influential The Scar of Race, coauthored with Thomas Piazza, and Reaching Beyond Race, among other books. Pierangelo Peri is Titular Lecturer of Methodology and Technics of Social Research at the University of Trento. Rui J. P. de Figueiredo, Jr., is Assistant Professor of Business and Public Policy at the Haas School of Business and is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Thomas Piazza is Senior Survey Statistician at the Survey Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Review :
"A timely, provocative analysis of the sources of political prejudice in contemporary Italy."--Choice