Anti-Muslim Bias in Foreign Policy Attitudes: Experimental Evidence From 13 European Countries

Recent work finds that ethnocentrism as well as group-specific prejudice can play a role in shaping foreign policy attitudes and that anti-Muslim bias is particularly influential. We evaluate the validity and generalizability of an anti-Muslim bias effect on foreign policy attitudes through survey experiments with over 19,500 participants in 13 European countries. The experiments assess cross-country generalizability and improve on existing scholarship by strengthening ecological validity – vignettes focus on the reports of persecution of four religious minorities by the Chinese state. We find strong evidence of an anti-Muslim bias: participants are less opposed to persecution and less likely to support intervention when asked about the persecution of Muslims, relative to other religious groups. However, this bias does not manifest uniformly in all countries. Thus, we suggest that anti-Muslim bias is both country- and domain-specific: it may influence attitudes in some countries and policy domains but not in others.