Who supports whom? Citizens’ support for affirmative action policies in recruitment processes towards four underrepresented groups

ABSTRACT

Despite the divisive character of Affirmative Action Policies (AAP)s, we still know very little about why some people oppose, while others support such regulations. We provide new evidence from a survey experiment in Germany, where we asked respondents to what extent they would support the introduction of a hypothetical regulation favouring – if equally qualified – members of an underrepresented group in the recruitment process for a management position. We randomly varied the APP’s target group between women, persons with an immigrant background, native East Germans and persons from a non-academic household. Our study shows that being a member of the AAP-targeted group significantly and substantially increases support for such a regulation. We also find evidence for increased support for AAP if the targeted group is perceived as disadvantaged. By contrast, our results do not back up the idea that prejudice affects AAP support.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the respondents who participated in our survey experiments. Furthermore, the authors are grateful to Jürgen Schupp and the participants of the colloquium at the Institute of Sociology at FU Berlin for their excellent comments on an earlier version of this article. Last but certainly not least, the authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors at JEPP for their constructive feedback and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We refrain from including LGTBIQ+ as the fifth target group in our vignette experiment. The introduction of quotas favouring members of the LGTBIQ+ group if equally qualified in recruitment processes for leading positions would require candidates to indicate their sexual orientation in their application. The implementation of such a regulation would therefore be much more challenging for the LGTBIQ+ group than the other underrepresented groups of our survey experiment. In order to provide vignettes that are as realistic as possible, we decided against the inclusion of LGTBIQ+ as the fifth AAP target group.

2 These results are robust when considering that the sampling group categories are not mutually exclusive, meaning that a member of one sampling group can, at the same time, also be a member of another sampling group. Figures S1-S4 of the Supporting Information also illustrate that these findings persist when including interactions among the different sampling groups.

3 The results are not altered by the introduction of indicators for the sequence with which we presented the vignettes to the respondents (see Table S5—S7 in the Supporting Information).

4 In Tables S8—S12 of the Supporting Information we introduced summarising scales for our three moderating measurements. We constructed these scales using principal component analysis. The results are not altered when we specify our models with the summarising scales instead of the separate items.

Additional information

Funding

The data collection was generously supported by the University of Göttingen (Céline Teney’s former affiliation).

Notes on contributors

Céline Teney

Céline Teney is a Full professor of macrosociology at the Institute of Sociology, Freie Universität Berlin.

Giuseppe Pietrantuono

Giuseppe Pietrantuono is a Postdoc researcher at the Institute of Sociology, Freie Universität Berlin.

Katja Möhring

Katja Möhring is Assistant Professor of Sociology of the Welfare State at the University of Mannheim.