Click to enlarge. Data source: World Values Survey
Update: A professor who studies race and ethnic conflict responds to this map.
When two Swedish economists set out to examine
whether economic freedom made people any more or less racist,
they knew how they would gauge economic freedom, but they needed to
find a way to measure a country’s level of racial tolerance. So they
turned to something called the World Values Survey, which has been
measuring global attitudes and opinions for decades.
Among the dozens of questions that World Values asks, the Swedish
economists found one that, they believe, could be a pretty good
indicator of tolerance for other races. The survey asked respondents in
more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would
not want as neighbors. Some respondents, picking from a list, chose
“people of a different race.” The more frequently that people in a given
country say they don’t want neighbors from other races, the economists
reasoned, the less racially tolerant you could call that society. (The
study concluded that economic freedom had no correlation with racial
tolerance, but it does appear to correlate with tolerance toward
homosexuals.)
Unfortunately, the Swedish economists did not include all of the World Values Survey data in their
final research paper. So I went back to
the source,
compiled the original data and mapped it out on the infographic above.
In the bluer countries, fewer people said they would not want neighbors
of a different race; in red countries, more people did.
If we treat this data as indicative of racial tolerance, then
we might conclude that people in the bluer countries are the least
likely to express racist attitudes, while the people in red countries
are the most likely.
Compare the results to
this map of the world’s most and least diverse countries.
Before we dive into the data, a couple of caveats. First, it’s
entirely likely that some people lied when answering this question; it
would be surprising if they hadn’t. But the operative question,
unanswerable, is whether people in certain countries were more or less
likely to answer the question honestly. For example, while the data
suggest that Swedes are more racially tolerant than Finns, it’s possible
that the two groups are equally tolerant but that Finns are just more
honest. The willingness to state such a preference out loud, though,
might be an indicator of racial attitudes in itself. Second, the survey
is not conducted every year; some of the results are very recent and
some are several years old, so we’re assuming the results are static,
which might not be the case.
Here’s what the data show:
• Anglo and Latin countries most tolerant. People in
the survey were most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor in
the United Kingdom and its Anglo former colonies (the United States,
Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and in Latin America. The only real
exceptions were oil-rich Venezuela, where income inequality sometimes
breaks along racial lines, and the Dominican Republic, perhaps because
of its adjacency to troubled Haiti. Scandinavian countries also scored
high.
• India and Jordan by far the least tolerant. In
only two of 81 surveyed countries, more than 40 percent of respondents
said they would not want a neighbor of a different race. This included
43.5 percent of Indians and 51.4 percent of Jordanian.
(Note: World
Values’ data for Bangladesh and Hong Kong appear to have been inverted,
with in fact only 28.3 and 26.8 percent, respectively, having indicated
they would not want a neighbor of a different race. Please see
correction at the bottom of this post.)
• Wide, interesting variation across Europe.
Immigration and national identity are big, touchy issues in much of
Europe, where racial make-ups are changing. Though you might expect the
richer, better-educated Western European nations to be more tolerant
than those in Eastern Europe, that’s not exactly the case. France
appeared to be one of the least racially tolerant countries on the
continent, with 22.7 percent saying they didn’t want a neighbor of
another race. Former Soviet states such as Belarus and Latvia scored as
more tolerant than much of Europe. Many in the Balkans, perhaps after
years of ethnicity-tinged wars, expressed lower racial tolerance.
• The Middle East not so tolerant. Immigration is
also a big issue in this region, particularly in Egypt and Saudi Arabia,
which often absorb economic migrants from poorer neighbors.
• Racial tolerance low in diverse Asian countries. Nations such as Indonesia and the Philippines, where
many racial groups
often jockey for influence and have complicated histories with one
another, showed more skepticism of diversity. This was also true, to a
lesser extent, in China and Kyrgyzstan. There were similar trends in
parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
• South Korea, not very tolerant, is an outlier.
Although the country is rich, well-educated, peaceful and ethnically
homogenous – all trends that appear to coincide with racial tolerance
– more than one in three South Koreans said they do not want a neighbor
of a different race. This may have to do with Korea’s particular view of
its own racial-national identity as unique – studied by scholars such
as B.R. Myers – and with the influx of Southeast Asian neighbors and the
nation’s long-held tensions with Japan.
• Pakistan, remarkably tolerant, also an outlier.
Although the country has a number of factors that coincide with racial
intolerance – sectarian violence, its location in the least-tolerant
region of the world, low economic and human development indices – only
6.5 percent of Pakistanis objected to a neighbor of a different race.
This would appear to suggest Pakistanis are more racially tolerant than
even the Germans or the Dutch.
Update: I’ve heard some version of one question from
an overwhelming number of readers: “I’ve met lots of Indians and
Americans and found the former more racially tolerant than the latter.
How can these results possibly be correct?” I’d suggest three possible
explanations for this, some combination of which may or may not be true.
First, both India and the U.S. are enormous countries; anecdotal
interactions are not representative of the whole, particularly given
that people who are wealthy enough to travel internationally may be
likely to encounter some subsets of these respective populations more
than others.
Second, the survey question gets to internal, personal preferences;
what the respondents want. One person’s experiences hanging out with
Americans or Indians, in addition to being anecdotal, only tell you
about their outward behavior. Both of those ways of observing racial
attitudes might suggest something about racial tolerance, but they’re
different indicators that measure different things, which could help
explain how one might contradict the other.
Third, the survey question is a way of judging racial tolerance but,
like many social science metrics, is indirect and imperfect. I cited the
hypothetical about Swedes and Finns at the top of this post, noting
that perhaps some people are just more honest about their racial
tolerance than others. It’s entirely possible that we’re seeing some
version of this effect in the U.S.-India comparison; maybe, for example,
Americans are conditioned by their education and media to keep these
sorts of racial preferences private, i.e. to lie about them on surveys,
in a way that Indians might not be. That difference would be interesting
in itself, but alas there is no survey question for honesty.
Correction: This post originally indicated that,
according to the World Values Survey, 71.7 percent of Bangladeshis and
71.8 percent of Hong Kongers had said that they would not want a
neighbor of a different race. In fact, those numbers appear to be
substantially lower, 28.3 percent and 26.8 percent, respectively. In
both cases, World Values appears to have erroneously posted the
incorrect data on its Web site. Ashirul Amin, posting at the Tufts
University Fletcher School’s emerging markets blog, looked into the data
for Bangladesh and discovered the mistake. My thanks to Amin, who is
Bangladeshi and was able to read the original questionnaire, for
pointing this out. His
analysis is worth reading in full, but here’s his conclusion:
The short answer is, yes, someone did fat finger
this big time. “Yes” and “No” got swapped in the second round of the
survey, which means that 28.3% of Bangladeshis said they wouldn’t want
neighbors of a different race – not 71.7%.
26K Facebook likers and 2.5K Tweeters, take note.
Amin adds, “Bangladeshis are a tolerant bunch — it’s ok to come visit.” The error in the Hong Kong data, first
discovered
by Chinese-speaking users on Reddit, was flagged by Engadget Chinese
editor Richard Lai. Ng Chun Hung, a University of Hong Kong professor
who was the principal investigator on World Values’ survey there,
confirmed via e-mail that the data had been transposed on the survey
company’s Web site. He added that he has written the World Values Survey
team to alert it to this and ask it to remove the faulty data. My
thanks to him, as well as to Lai and the Reddit users who dug through
original Chinese-language survey forms to demonstrate the error.
