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Back to “normal”: the short-lived impact of an online NGO campaign of government discrimination in Hungary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2021

Gabor Simonovits Open the ORCID record for Gabor Simonovits [Opens in a new window] ,
Bori Simonovits ,
Adam Vig ,
Peter Hobot ,
Renata Nemeth  and
Gabor Csomor
Gabor Simonovits*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Central European University, Academic Co-director, Rajk College for Advanced Studies, Budapest, Hungary
Bori Simonovits
Affiliation:
Budapest Faculty of Education and Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
Adam Vig
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary
Peter Hobot
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary
Renata Nemeth
Affiliation:
Department of Statistics, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
Gabor Csomor
Affiliation:
Independent Researcher, Budapest, Hungary
*
*Corresponding author. Email: simonovitsg@ceu.edu
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Abstract

To what extent can civil rights NGOs protect ethnic minorities against unequal treatment? We study this question by combining an audit experiment of 1260 local governments in Hungary with an intervention conducted in collaboration with a major Hungarian civil rights NGO. In the audit experiment we demonstrated that Roma individuals were about 13 percent-points less likely to receive responses to information requests from local governments, and the responses they received were of substantially lower quality. The intervention that reminded a random subset of local governments of their legal responsibility of equal treatment led to a short-term reduction in their discriminatory behavior, but the effects of the intervention dissipated within a month. These findings suggest that civil rights NGOs might face substantive difficulties in trying to reduce discrimination through simple information campaigns.

Keywords

American politicsexperimental researchfield experimentspolitical psychologypublic opinion
Type
Research Note
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , October 2022 , pp. 848 - 856
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Political Science Association

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Supplementary material: Link

Simonovits et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KPSCLK
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Simonovits et al. supplementary material

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