Cross-national patterns in racism at the macro-level

Racism refers to the historically grown beliefs and practices that systematically disadvantage some ethno-racial groups. It has been conceptualized and measured by different research traditions, which each focuses on another aspect of racism, among which are discriminatory behaviour, perceived discrimination, explicit attitudes, and implicit bias. Unfortunately, there is little interdisciplinary integration of these aspects. This is a serious gap because each approach is reductionist and often yields other answers to basic research questions. The overall goal of this project is to examine the interlinked patterns of these four aspects of racism at the macro-level of societies. This aim fits into the recent macro-social turn in racism studies. We start with a theoretical and empirical integration of these four racism dimensions at the macro-level, and subsequently link them to other macrostructural contextual factors. In addition, we further examine the cross-national patterns of these dimensions by taking their historical path-dependencies into account. Finally, we elaborate on the theoretical implications of our research findings for the principles and mechanisms of the recent macro-social turn in racism studies.