‘Cologne Changed Everything’—The Effect of Threatening Events on the Frequency and Distribution of Intergroup Conflict in Germany

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Abstract

In this article, I study the role that threatening events play in shaping both the occurrence and the distribution of intergroup conflict. Using the case of anti-refugee attacks in Germany, the study finds that the 2015 New Year’s Eve (NYE) sexual assaults led to a dramatic surge in the daily rate of violence, far surpassing the more short-lived effect of domestic and European terrorist attacks. Importantly, this effect was more pronounced among districts with low prior levels of anti-refugee hostility and far-right support. The NYE event both increased the frequency and changed the distribution of subsequent attacks—mobilizing new, previously peaceful communities to behave aggressively towards local refugee populations. Together, these findings reveal that threatening events not only affect the amount of intergroup conflict, but may also alter the structural conditions under which such conflict emerges in the first place.

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Threshold Models of Collective Behavior

Mark Granovetter (1978)

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Politicized Places: Explaining Where and When Immigrants Provoke Local Opposition

Daniel Hopkins (2010)

In ethnic and racial terms, America is growing rapidly more diverse. Yet attempts to extend racial threat hypotheses to today's immigrants have generated inconsistent results. This article develops the politicized places hypothesis, an alternative that focuses on how national and local conditions interact to construe immigrants as threatening. Hostile political reactions to neighboring immigrants are most likely when communities undergo sudden influxes of immigrants and when salient national rhetoric reinforces the threat. Data from several sources, including twelve geocoded surveys from 1992 to 2009, provide consistent support for this approach. Time-series cross-sectional and panel data allow the analysis to exploit exogenous shifts in salient national issues such as the September 11 attacks, reducing the problem of residential self-selection and other threats to validity. The article also tests the hypothesis using new data on local anti-immigrant policies. By highlighting the interaction of local and national conditions, the politicized places hypothesis can explain both individual attitudes and local political outcomes.