13:15 - 15:30
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Kerim Kavakli
Discussant/s:
Sergi Pardos-Prado
Meeting Room P

Kerim Kavakli
Refugee Evictions and the Spread of Refugee-Native Clashes: Evidence from Turkey

Andrea Carla Bianculli, Juan Carlos Triviño-Salazar
The Regional Governance of Immigrant Reception: Mercosur before the presence of Venezuelans in South America

William Allen, Isabel Ruiz
Colombian Attitudes Towards Venezuelan Migrants: Conjoint Experimental Evidence from a South-South Mixed Migration Context

Anna Getmansky, Tolga Sinmazdemir, Konstantinos Matakos
Humanitarian Concerns and Acceptance of Syrian Refugees in Turkey
Humanitarian Concerns and Acceptance of Syrian Refugees in Turkey
Anna Getmansky 1, Tolga Sinmazdemir 2, Konstantinos Matakos 3
1 LSE
2 SOAS
3 KCL

Do humanitarian concerns affect the willingness of the host society to host refugees? Evidence from Western democracies suggests they do, but it is not clear whether they also matter in non-Western societies that host most of the refugees. We conceptualize humanitarianism along three dimensions: referent object, domain of applicability, and referent subject. Using data from a conjoint experiment among over 2,300 respondents in Turkey, we examine how information about torture shapes local population attitudes towards Syrian refugees. We find that while support for profiles of torture victims is higher than for profiles of refugees who were not tortured, the substantive effect of information on torture is relatively modest compared to other drivers of public opinion and compared to findings in the West. Nonetheless, information on torture increases support for all refugees regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender, and education--in line with our expectation about humanitarianism. Among the host population, the information that a refugee suffered from torture equally affects all respondents, except for female respondents who are swayed by such information more than male respondents. Finally, the effect of information on torture is similar across different domains of hosting refugees--social, economic, and political. Overall, we conclude that although humanitarian concerns matter, their effect in Turkey is quite modest in line with breadth-depth tradeoff.