In this study, we contribute to the existing body of discrimination research by focusing on the contextual nature of discrimination and examining how different organizational settings affect employers’ hiring decisions. We test a set of pre-registered hypotheses about organizational moderators of ethnic discrimination in hiring using data from a cross-nationally harmonized factorial survey experiment (FSE) conducted in Germany, Norway, Poland and Romania.
Our findings demonstrate that employers’ hiring decisions are shaped by organisational contexts, which define their opportunities for discrimination and the extent to which prejudice or stereotypes translate into discriminatory behaviour. While reducing prejudice and stereotypes through policy may be challenging, organisational policies and practices are easier to modify, providing a tangible avenue for interventions to reduce discrimination.
This paper is structured as follows. After the introduction, Section 2 provides a theoretical framework and discusses our expectations about the interplay between organizational characteristics and hiring discrimination based on national origin. Section 3 details the data and methods used in the study. Section 4 discusses the empirical strategy while Section 5 presents the main results and Section 6 the robustness checks. Section 7 concludes.
Authors: Dominik Buttler, Vegar Bjørnshagen, Marta Palczyńska, Mateusz Smoter, Christian Imdorf