Belief in White Replacement

ABSTRACT

The “White Replacement” conspiracy theory, that governments and corporations are “replacing” white people, is linked to several mass shootings. Given its recent ubiquity in elite rhetoric, concerns have arisen about the popularity of this conspiracy theory among the United States mass public. Further, political scientists have noted a need to understand why people believe or act upon this conspiracy theory. Using a 2022 US national survey (n = 2001), we find that a third of Americans agree that leaders are replacing white people with people of color. These beliefs are related to anti-social personality traits, various forms of nationalist and authoritarian sentiments, and negative sentiments toward immigrants, minorities, women, and the political establishment. Regression analysis however fails to find significant effects of partisanship and ideology on these beliefs. Further, we observed that these beliefs are related to a desire to engage in both normative (e.g., run for political office) and nonnormative political participation (e.g., commit violence). Given the popularity of White Replacement conspiracy theories in the US and elsewhere, our findings suggest new avenues for research into potentially dangerous beliefs, as well as xenophobia, antisemitism, racism, sexism, extremism, and political violence.

KEYWORDS:

• White Replacement
• immigration
• political violence
• conspiracy theories
• xenophobia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

Approval to conduct research with human subjects was granted by the University of Miami Human Subject Research Office on May 13, 2022 (Protocol # 20220472).

Author contributions

Designed research: JU, CK, OC, AE, MS, AD; Performed research: CK, JU, AE, SL; Analyzed data: CK, AE, SW; Wrote the paper: JU, CK, OC, AE, AD, SL, SK, MM, KP, MS, JF, DV, SW; Designed Figures: SW. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

Data sharing plans

All data, documentation, and code used in this analysis is available on the Harvard Dataverse: "Replication Data for: Belief in White Replacement", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WQ9AMS

Additional information

Funding

The efforts of CK, JU, JF, MS, SL, MM, KP, DV, and SW are funded by National Science Foundation Grant #2123635. The efforts of AD and SK are funded by National Science Foundation grant #2123618. The data collection was funded by a grant from the University of Miami U-Link initiative.