Description

Two Models of Racial Discrimination in Europe? Results from a Comparative Field Experiment in Germany, the Netherlands and Spain

Professor Polavieja will present the results of the first large-scale comparative field experiment on racial discrimination in hiring ever conducted in Europe. Using a harmonized methodology, Polavieja’s team sent 12,900 fictitious résumés to real vacancies in Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, randomly varying applicants’ ethnic ancestry (signalled foremost by ethnic names) and applicants’ racial appearance (signalled using applicants’ photographs). They examine average differences in callback rates across four phenotypic groups and for applicants coming from four regions of ancestry. They propose two models of racial discrimination: the independent racial appearance effects model and the appearance-ethnicity intersection model. They find the former model provides the best fit to the Dutch and the German data, whereas the latter better fits the data in Spain.

Speaker

Javier Polavieja (Oxford University PhD in Sociology, 2001) is Banco Santander Professor of Sociology and Director of the D-Lab at the Department of Social Sciences, University Carlos III of Madrid. His main fields of research are social stratification, economic sociology, and migration research. His work has been published in leading international journals including, amongst several others, the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, European Sociological Review, Socio-Economic Review, Labour Economics, Social Forces, International Migration Review, Political Behavior, and Electoral Studies. He has received several international awards, including the European Academy of Sociology Best Paper Award (2014), the Robert K. Merton Award (2014) and the European Sociological Review Best Paper Award (2019). Since 2015, Polavieja is Fellow of the European Academy of Sociology.

Practical information

Languages: English
Organisers: Joint Research Centre