About

Scott Blinder is a professor affiliated with the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is involved with the Computational Social Science Institute. His research focuses on political psychology and political communication, particularly around issues involving social identities. He examines public opinion, media coverage, and political rhetoric, especially in substantive domains such as immigration, the integration of religious and ethnic minorities, and gender and politics. Methodologically, he combines traditional tools of political psychological research with new forms of computer-assisted content analysis of textual data. His research includes a strand that combines public opinion with corpus linguistic research on media coverage of migration and related issues, aiming to understand the sources of citizens’ implicit beliefs about immigrants and refugees. Another area of his work investigates the impact of social norms against prejudice and individual motivation to follow these norms. He finds that these norms and motivations influence attitudes toward diversity and related policies, and also limit responsiveness to efforts to mobilize hostility toward outsiders in service of radical right-wing political movements.

Research topics

• Political science
• Social psychology
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Demographic economics

Selected publications

• It's Not the Economy: The Effect of Framing Arguments on Attitudes Toward Refugees

  International Migration Review · 2025-07-07

  article

  Which arguments for refugee admissions are most persuasive to publics in receiving states? Some refugee scholars and advocates insist that the way to maximize support for refugee admissions is to emphasize their instrumental economic benefit to receiving states. Others prefer arguments based in legal or moral obligations, arguing that economic arguments risk undermining support for the most vulnerable or needy refugees. In this article, we assess whether and how economic, legal, and moral arguments affect Americans’ support for refugee admissions, and which types of refugees they prefer to admit. We report results from a nationally representative survey in the United States ( N = 1,297), with an embedded survey experiment and conjoint decision task. We find that the moral argument led to more support for refugee admissions, while the legal argument increased support only among non-Republicans, and the economic argument had no discernible impact. In the conjoint task, the economic argument increased preferences for economically productive potential refugees, but in a way that focused on lower-status occupations. Our findings suggest that while the economic argument may not reduce support, other approaches are more likely to increase Americans’ support for refugees.

  PublisherDOI

• Victim, perpetrator, neither: Attitudes on deservingness and culpability in immigration law

  Law & Society Review · 2022-08-04

  article

  Abstract This study examines whether there is popular support for a restrictive immigration policy aimed at denying safe haven to human rights abusers and those affiliated with terrorism. We designed a public opinion survey experiment that asks respondents to evaluate whether low level or high-level Taliban members who otherwise qualify for refugee status deserve immigration benefits. We found that a majority of respondents did not immediately deny a visa to low-level worker. Looking at respondents' explanations for their decision, we find two distinct clusters of reasons that we classify as either circumstantial –focused on the particularities of the case–or categorical –focused on general attributes of the applicant. We suggest that domestic and international criminal law logics about acts and intentions, as well as roles and responsibilities, are reflected in beliefs about deservingness in this distinct immigration context, and may support more generous attitudes toward those seeking refugee status. Many respondents using circumstantial reasoning saw a distinction between the jobs potential immigrants have done in their pasts and what they actually believe, underscoring the fraught dynamics of armed conflict in which people may be swept up in violence they do not support.

  PublisherDOI

• Are voters prejudiced against ethnic minority candidates? We asked and the results were telling

  2020-02-19

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: Biases at the Ballot Box: How Multiple Forms of Voter Discrimination Impede the Descriptive and Substantive Representation of Ethnic Minority Groups

  Harvard Dataverse · 2020-01-21

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  This contains replication data and code using the statistical software Stata for analysis presented in the forthcoming article "Biases at the Ballot Box: How Multiple Forms of Voter Discrimination Impede the Descriptive and Substantive Representation of Ethnic Minority Groups" in the journal Political Behavior. This data is derived from the British Election Study Internet Panel: Fieldhouse, E., J. Green, G. Evans, J. Mellon & C. Prosser (2019) British Election Study Internet Panel Waves 1-16. DOI: 10.15127/1.293723 The terms and conditions of access to British Election Study data state that anyone downloading British Election Study Data agrees in perpetuity, starting from the effective date of this agreement: 1. Not to attempt to identify any individual (living or dead) using information contained with those data (including in British Election Study data obtained previously or in British Election Study data obtained from other sources). 2. Not to divulge to third parties any Personal Data, Personal Information, confidential data or proprietary information which they encounter during their use of BES data. 3. Not to share or give access to the data to any third party who has not agreed to these conditions. 4. To protect personal data from the BES in accordance with the provisions and principles of General Data Protection Regulations and the Data Protection Act 1998 and its amendments. 5. Any incidents of unauthorised access to, processing of or disclosing of the personal data must be reported immediately the BES team (BES@Manchester.ac.uk). 6. You acknowledge that the BES and the relevant funding agency/agencies bear no responsibility for use of the data or for interpretations or inferences based upon such uses. 7. To use the correct methods of citation and acknowledgement in publications as given with each dataset.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Biases at the Ballot Box: How Multiple Forms of Voter Discrimination Impede the Descriptive and Substantive Representation of Ethnic Minority Groups

  Political Behavior · 2020-02-13 · 48 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Research shows that ethnic minority candidates often face an electoral penalty at the ballot box. In this study, we argue that this penalty depends on both candidate and voter characteristics, and that pro-minority policy positions incur a greater penalty than a candidate’s ethnic background itself. Using a conjoint experiment embedded in a panel study of British voters, we investigate the relative contributions of candidate ethnicity, policy positions, affirmative action, and voter attitudes to this electoral penalty. We find that although Pakistani (Muslim) candidates are penalized directly for their ethnicity, black Caribbean candidates receive on average the same levels of support as white British ones. However, black Caribbean candidates suffer conditional discrimination where they are penalized if they express support for pro-minority policies, and all candidates are penalized for having been selected through an affirmative action initiative. We also find that some white British voters are more inclined to support a black Caribbean candidate than a white British one, all else being equal. These voters (one quarter of our sample) have cosmopolitan views on immigration, and a strong commitment to anti-prejudice norms. However, despite efforts across parties to increase the ethnic diversity of candidates for office, many voters’ preferences continue to pose barriers toward descriptive and substantive representation of ethnic minority groups.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• replication code.do

  Harvard Dataverse · 2020-01-01

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  :unav

  PublisherDOI

• Biases at the Ballot Box: How Multiple Forms of Voter Discrimination Impede the Descriptive and Substantive Representation of Ethnic Minority Groups

  Scholarworks (University of Massachusetts Amherst) · 2020-02-13

  articleSenior author

  Research shows that ethnic minority candidates often face an electoral penalty at the ballot box. In this study, we argue that this penalty depends on both candidate and voter characteristics, and that pro-minority policy positions incur a greater penalty than a candidate’s ethnic background itself. Using a conjoint experiment embedded in a panel study of British voters, we investigate the relative contributions of candidate ethnicity, policy positions, affirmative action, and voter attitudes to this electoral penalty. We find that although Pakistani (Muslim) candidates are penalized directly for their ethnicity, black Caribbean candidates receive on average the same levels of support as white British ones. However, black Caribbean candidates suffer conditional discrimination where they are penalized if they express support for pro-minority policies, and all candidates are penalized for having been selected through an affirmative action initiative. We also find that some white British voters are more inclined to support a black Caribbean candidate than a white British one, all else being equal. These voters (one quarter of our sample) have cosmopolitan views on immigration, and a strong commitment to anti-prejudice norms. However, despite efforts across parties to increase the ethnic diversity of candidates for office, many voters’ preferences continue to pose barriers toward descriptive and substantive representation of ethnic minority groups.

  Publisher

• REMINDER Integrated Multilevel Database on Migration in the EU: Flows, Impacts, and Public Opinion (OA edition)

  AUSSDA - The Austrian Social Science Data Archive · 2020-04-28

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  Full edition for public use. The REMINDER Integrated Multilevel Database on Migration in the EU brings together cross-national public opinion data and statistics related to immigration and EU mobility from multiple sources. The archived material offers complete replication code and auxiliary files to assist researchers in reconstructing and expanding the database for their own analyses. Please note that replication requires users to access the original survey data separately. The integrated database consists of 184400 observations and 160 variables, 61 of which are at the country level (28 EU plus Norway and Switzerland). We harmonize existing and newly collected survey data between 2002 and 2017, matched with country level data on the welfare impacts of immigration as well as stocks and flows of immigrant populations.

  PublisherDOI

• replicationdata.tab

  Harvard Dataverse · 2020-01-01

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  :unav

  PublisherDOI

• Informing Realities

  2019-03-28 · 6 citations

  book-chapter

  Abstract This chapter addresses how research and public debate about migration interact with and inform each other, focusing on public perceptions and media coverage as important aspects. Factors including generalized public innumeracy about migration levels, effects of emotions on perceptions, and variation in the perceived credibility of different messengers make communicating information—of which research evidence is an important type—a complex process with multiple points of potential resistance. Meanwhile, the demands and expectations of public users and policy-makers can influence how research happens and the types of questions that are seen to be more meaningful. These interrelationships exist within wider social, political, and economic contexts that, in certain circumstances, are likely to favour some outcomes over others. In total, the chapter argues that the pathway from generating research evidence to impacting public debates is not only uncertain, it is also more complex than is often presumed.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Elisabeth Ivarsflaten

  16 shared

• Robert Ford

  14 shared

• William Allen

  University of Oxford

  5 shared

• Nicole Martin

  University of Manchester

  5 shared

• Robert McNeil

  3 shared

• Meredith Rolfe

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  3 shared

• Jamie Rowen

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  2 shared

• Rebecca Hamlin

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  2 shared