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 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.