Breaking the Exclusion Cycle

Social exclusion of marginalized populations is an intractable problem of global relevance. Breaking the Exclusion Cycle develops a theory of how individual behaviors contribute to its persistence, and presents a possible solution. The book introduces the “exclusion cycle,” which consists of four parts. Antiminority culture gives rise to discrimination by members of the majority. Members of the minority anticipate maltreatment and develop survival strategies. Members of the majority often disapprove of minority’s survival strategies, ethnicize them, and attribute them to the minority as such, and not the discrimination. Such attribution errors feed the existing anti-minority culture and the cycle repeats. The empirical portion of the book is centered on the social exclusion of Roma (derogatively known as “Gypsies”) in Slovenia, which the book uses to illustrate the theory and to offer evidence that the vicious cycle can be broken. Specifically, the findings in the book suggest that Roma-led, NGO-promoted dialogue and intergroup contact strategies can help reduce non-Roma discrimination against the Roma. The empirics in the book rest on original evidence collected over twelve months of fieldwork. The centerpieces are two lab-infield experiments, one involving a trust game and one involving the public goods game administered via original videogame. The experiments capture discriminatory behavior by non-Roma and survival strategies by Roma, and are supplemented by interviews, field observations, and surveys. While the empirics focus on Roma and non-Roma, the theory as well as the implications of the findings apply to other cases of marginalized populations.