Native bias: OVERCOMING DISCRIMINATION AGAINST IMMIGRANTS​
with Donghyun Danny Choi and Nicholas Sambanis, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS (Princeton Studies in Political Behavior) (2022)

This book argues that inter-group conflict between natives and immigrants can be decreased through shared social norms that define a common ingroup identity. Anti-immigrant bias is a form of ethnic conflict driven mainly by cultural differences. These differences create "social distance" between natives and immigrants, leading to bias and discrimination. The usual prescription to reduce bias via reducing social distance has been to change the expression of ascriptive differences that categorize immigrants as an outgroup relative to the native ingroup: immigrants will often change their names, their customs, their language, and even their religion. This process, often pursued by policies of coercive assimilation of immigrant populations, changes group boundaries to forge a degree of homogeneity that is thought to be required to reduce intergroup conflict. This book argues that it is not necessary for immigrants to change their appearance, their religion, or their language in an attempt to "pass" as members of the majority. Rather, bias and discrimination toward immigrants can be reduced if immigrants and natives share social norms that define a common ingroup identity as citizens.

​The key here is that norms must be shared — not that the burden must necessarily be on immigrants to adopt to local norms that they find repressive. Although norm-sharing will often take place through a process of assimilation of minority groups into majority populations, it could also occur via a gradual, two-way process of mutual acculturation over time. In the short term, one strategy to overcome sources of bias and discrimination is to resolve uncertainty about the depth of ideational differences that divide natives and immigrants. This book shows that, when natives observe immigrant behavior that suggests that the two groups share valued civic norms, this reduces discrimination by de-emphasizing the native-immigrant divide and forging a common ingroup identity that includes both natives and immigrants. Different shared identities can be defined by different norms; and the more salient is that identity to each individual’s self-concept, the more discrimination toward immigrants will be reduced. This conclusion speaks to an ongoing debate about the limits of multiculturalism in Europe. Our book suggests that multiculturalism is possible, but that it also has its limits. It is possible to reduce discrimination due to differences in ascriptive traits, but this requires sharing norms and ideas, which would eliminate the symbolic threat generated by ascriptive differences.

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* Winner of the 2023 Best Book Award from the Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association.
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Endorsements

“Native Bias offers a compelling and hopeful analysis of the challenges facing countries grappling with increasing cultural diversity. Focusing on the integration of Muslims in Germany, a series of clever experiments reveals what it takes for majorities to stop discriminating against minorities. Indispensable reading for anyone interested in immigrant integration and multicultural politics!”
​--Rafaela M. Dancygier, author of Dilemmas of Inclusion: Muslims in European Politics
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“This excellent book addresses one of the most important issues of our time: how to overcome the discrimination of immigrants and, ultimately, how to secure their successful integration into new societies. This is a major contribution not only to the study of immigrant discrimination and integration, but also to intergroup relations more broadly."
--Peter Thisted Dinesen, University of Copenhagen

“Setting a new standard for theoretically guided fieldwork, Native Bias presents an array of elegant experiments staged in dozens of cities and involving thousands of bystanders. These unobtrusive studies of discrimination do more than simply document the fact that natives look down on immigrants; they illuminate the conditions under which anti-immigrant discrimination diminishes, underscoring in particular the importance of challenging stereotypes that portray immigrants as hostile or indifferent to the values of the native majority.”
--Donald P. Green, Columbia University

“Based on an impressive battery of original field experiments and surveys, this work holds a powerful message: bias and discrimination against Muslim immigrants are widespread and persistent in Europe. Native Bias shows that these shortcomings can be overcome by shared civic norms and identities.”
--Christian Joppke, University of Bern

“This is a terrific book—one of the best I’ve read in a long time. Polished, theoretically sophisticated, and logically structured, it brings to bear new evidence and approaches on a critical contemporary topic.”
--Daniel N. Posner, University of California, Los Angeles

CREATING PARTISANS: THE ORGANIZATIONAL ROOTS OF NEW PARTIES IN LATIN AMERICA 
Cambridge University Press (2024)

Why are some new political parties successful at creating mass partisanship and engendering stable electoral support, while most fail to take root in society and disappear quickly? Creating Partisans unveils the secrets behind successful political parties, taking a deep dive into the formation and success of new political parties in Latin America. Based on extensive fieldwork and using a multi-method approach, this book explores how different mobilization strategies sway voters to support new parties. While prior studies have focused on the various types of direct appeals parties make to voters, Creating Partisans reveals that it is organizationally mediated appeals – those that engage voters through locally based civil society organizations – that can secure electoral support more effectively and can create lasting partisan attachments. From indigenous organizations to informal sector unions, new types of societal organizations play a critical mediating role in shaping electoral outcomes and fostering long-term partisan loyalties in young democracies.

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Endorsements

"How do some new parties gain support and endure? This innovative and rigorous analysis argues that, surprisingly, civil society organizations reassure and guide voters, communicating party messages, persuading potential voters, and building lasting partisan attachments. An indispensable book for scholars of party politics and representation."
—Anna Grzymala-Busse, Stanford University

"Run-of-the-mill research on political parties pays too little attention to the hard work of setting up and sustaining electorally successful political parties by creating strong bonds between voters and politicians. This book makes a major contribution to fill that void and explain how new parties can become electorally successful if they build organizational capacities that tie them to the communities from which they draw their voters. It develops an innovative theoretical argument focusing on the infrastructure of local civic associations as critical catalysts to familiarize voters with and connect them to new political parties. Such associational ties build durable party identification in the electorate, thereby improving the upstarts’ prospects of lasting electoral viability. The book employs state-of-the-art empirical research designs and data generation techniques to identify the role of civic associations and their ties to emerging parties as causally consequential for the electoral careers of the new party competitors."
—Herbert Kitschelt, Duke University

"As political parties weaken across the world, identifying viable paths to party-building has become an essential task. Creating Partisans does precisely that. Challenging the widely-held view that strong partisan attachments are a thing of the past, the book makes a compelling case that robust mass parties can still emerge--if they are linked to societal organizations. Drawing on impressive research in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Mexico, Poertner shows how indigenous, neighborhood-based, informal workers, and other civil society organizations help new parties cultivate durable voter attachments, much as trade unions did in the past. And through careful historical institutionalist analysis, he identifies the conditions under which strong party-organizational ties emerge. Creating Partisans is one of the most important books on Latin American party-building published in the twenty-first century. Anyone interested in the fate of contemporary political parties should read it."
—Steven Levitsky, Harvard University

​"How do new parties engender mass support? Received wisdom, including theories of childhood partisan socialization, cannot tell us the answer. Poertner develops a rich and highly convincing account of the effectiveness of voter appeals that are mediated by societal organizations. Leveraging comparative case studies of new parties in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Mexico and highly original survey and natural experiments, Poertner provides striking new answers to a critical question for democratic politics."
—Thad Dunning, University of California, Berkeley