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Social exclusion is complex, intractable, and devastating. It occurs where individuals or groups cannot fully participate in the typical activities of the societies in which they live, whether they are excluded economically, politically, or live in segregation. In this review, I highlight recent work in the area of social exclusion and ethnicity, focusing on Europe and Eurasia. Scholarship reveals ethnic hierarchies of exclusion in hiring and housing markets, educational approaches that cloak assimilationist practice in the language of inclusion, a plethora of strategies that minorities use to navigate exclusion, and more. While new research brings innovation and insight, it nevertheless remains fragmented along several dimensions. As scholars work to move the field forward, bridging substantive areas of exclusion, studying the complex dynamic of interactions between majorities and minorities, and collaborating across methodological divides would be particularly valuable.

Clinical practice, data collection, and medical AI constitute self-reinforcing and interacting cycles of exclusion

In the past 25 years, education funding in Oklahoma has stagnated. In some schools, students learn about American politics from tattered textbooks in which George W. Bush is listed as the current president (Hendry and Pasquantonio 2018). Across the board, teachers are grossly underpaid, yet many are compelled to buy school supplies with their own funds (Felder 2018a). Moreover, in one out of five schools, students come to class only four days a week (Carlson 2018). After the state legislature failed to pass a funding package to sufficiently increase spending on schools and salaries in early 2018, teachers across Oklahoma walked out on their jobs to protest at the Capitol for nine days. In addition to sharing their grievances, the hundreds of protesting educators had something else in common: many were women.

What leads individuals to be motivated to act for human rights causes? Human rights organizations (HROs) often use personal and emotional stories of the abused in order to gain the attention of individuals reading newspapers or emails directly from the organization. McEntire, Leiby, and Krain show that personal frames are most successful at increasing knowledge about a specific human rights situation and motivating individuals to act. However, HROs are not operating in a political vacuum; repressive governments often try to spin information about abuses and the abused to their advantage. This study uses an experimental approach to address how the discursive interactions between states and HROs influence individual-level support of HRO efforts. When governments respond to HRO claims by labeling the abused as a terrorist, individuals are much less likely to be spurred into certain types of action, like signing a petition, and feel differently about the specific case. Interestingly, we do not find that trust in the information provided by an HRO is harmed by being associated with someone labeled a terrorist.

Chapter 4, the book’s first empirical chapter, introduces two lab-in-field experiments that form the core of the book’s data-gathering strategy. The first experiment uses the trust game and demonstrates that non-Roma from Novo mesto discriminate against the Roma in the context of single interactions. The second experiment uses an iterated public goods game, delivered in the form of an original tower-building videogame, developed to allow participants who cannot read to take part in the study and to capture repeated interactions in a context where face-to-face interactions might be contentious. It shows that non-Roma from Novo mesto discriminate against the Roma in the context of repeated interactions, even when Roma behaviors in the game are identical to non-Roma behaviors. This experiment also demonstrates that Roma from Novo mesto use survival strategies, but to a much lesser degree than stereotyping would lead one to expect.

Chapter 3 introduces the case of the Roma. Roma are Europe’s largest ethnic minority (10–12 million) and are derogatively called “Gypsies.” Chapter 3 discusses Roma diversity, touching on language and dialect, customs, and traditional occupations. It also offers a few examples of how varying social, economic, and political circumstances might have differently affected Roma communities throughout Central and Eastern Europe. The Chapter then introduces Roma in Slovenia, and concludes with an illustration of a Roma exclusion cycle through the lens of a murder-suicide that happened in 2011, in Novo mesto, the first of the two field sites where the data for the empirical portion of the book were collected.

Chapter 5, the second empirical chapter, explores the non-Roma parts of the exclusion cycle. It introduces the second Slovenian research site, Murska Sobota, which closely matches the first site, Novo mesto, in all relevant characteristics but one: the Roma-led NGO in Murska Sobota focuses on promoting intergroup contact, while its counterpart in Novo mesto provides goods and services to local Roma. In contrast to non-Roma from Novo mesto, non-Roma from Murska Sobota do not discriminate against the Roma. This is particularly true of non-Roma who are familiar with the contact-promoting Roma NGO or attend its events. Further, although non-Roma from both towns express anti- Roma sentiment and commit attribution errors, non-Roma from Novo mesto do so to a greater extent. In that town, non-Roma who express anti-Roma sentiment are more likely to discriminate against the Roma in the videogame. Overall, these results suggest that NGO-promoted intergroup contact can help reduce discrimination.

Chapter 1 introduces the book. It discusses the importance of social exclusion and justifies the book’s focus on the role that individual behaviors play in perpetuating it. The Chapter presents the theory of the exclusion cycle and introduces the case of Roma (derogatively “Gypsies”) and non-Roma in Slovenia, which the book uses to illustrate the cyclical theory. The Chapter then briefly discusses why NGO promotion of intergroup contact might help break the cycle, and presents the key empirical contributions of the book. The Chapter also discusses the scope of the argument, comments on how common exclusion cycles might be and when they might develop, and concludes with a short description of the remaining chapters.

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.

Chapter 2 uses the examples of Batwa in Uganda, black and Latino boys in Oakland, Muslim immigrants in France, and Jews in Vienna to present and develop the theory of the exclusion cycle. The exclusion cycle results when behaviors of the majority and the marginalized minority interact and feed into one another. The cycle starts with anti-minority culture, which gives rise to discrimination against the minority. As members of the majority discriminate, members of the marginalized minority develop survival strategies. Members of the majority often dislike survival strategies used by the minority, ethnicize them, and incorrectly attribute them to the minority as such, and not the discrimination. Such attribution errors feed the already existing anti-minority culture and the cycle continues. After presenting the theory, the Chapter offers a brief overview of the literature on prejudice, discrimination, and intergroup contact, and discusses how positive intergroup contact might help break they cyclical dynamic.

Chapter 6, the third and final empirical chapter, explores Roma engagement in survival strategies, focusing on three factors that might affect it: deprivation, personal experience of discrimination, and perceptions of stereotype intractability. The chapter links Roma game behaviors to their answers to an extensive survey and finds that neither deprivation nor perceptions of stereotype intractability are linked to engagement in survival strategies. However, Roma who report personally experiencing discrimination are more likely to resort to survival strategies. By asking Roma about their experiences of discrimination, this chapter provides independent corroboration of the experimental findings presented in Chapters 4 and 5, which directly captured non-Roma discriminatory behaviors.

Can human rights institutions influence individual behavior? This article tests the ground level effectiveness of two strategies that aim to eliminate discrimination: a powerful, top-down combination of incentives and norm promotion and a bottom-up NGO-based effort. The study uses a hard case, that of discrimination against the Roma (commonly known by the disfavored term “Gypsies”), spans three towns, Murska Sobota and Novo mesto in Slovenia and Čakovec in Croatia, and includes altogether 606 subjects. Levels of discrimination are estimated via trust games played with money, which are particularly appropriate because the Roma are widely stereotyped as cheaters and thieves. The findings suggest that the EU accession process, widely regarded as a strong incentive-based and norm promoting rights change mechanism, may not substantially reduce discrimination on the ground. Instead, they suggest that ground level organizing aimed at improving relations between Roma and non-Roma helps reduce discrimination.

This paper measures discrimination against the Roma (commonly known by the disfavored term "Gypsies") to test the ground level efficacy of two strategies of human rights improvement: top-down diffusion and bottom-up change. The study spans three towns, Murska Sobota and Novo mesto in Slovenia and Cakovec in Croatia, and includes over 600 subjects. Levels of discrimination were estimated via trust games played with money, which are particularly appropriate because the Roma are widely stereotyped as cheaters and thieves. The findings suggest that the EU accession process, widely regarded as an exceptionally strong incentive-based mechanism of rights diffusion, does not severely reduce discrimination on the ground. Instead, they suggest that ground level organizing aimed at improving relations between Roma and non-Roma helps reduce discrimination.

The biochemical and physical factors controlling protein expression level and solubility in vivo remain incompletely characterized. To gain insight into the primary sequence features influencing these outcomes, we performed statistical analyses of results from the high-throughput protein-production pipeline of the Northeast Structural Genomics Consortium. Proteins expressed in E. coli and consistently purified were scored independently for expression and solubility levels. These parameters nonetheless show a very strong positive correlation. We used logistic regressions to determine whether they are systematically influenced by fractional amino acid composition or several bulk sequence parameters including hydrophobicity, sidechain entropy, electrostatic charge, and predicted backbone disorder. Decreasing hydrophobicity correlates with higher expression and solubility levels, but this correlation apparently derives solely from the beneficial effect of three charged amino acids, at least for bacterial proteins. In fact, the three most hydrophobic residues showed very different correlations with solubility level. Leu showed the strongest negative correlation among amino acids, while Ile showed a slightly positive correlation in most data segments. Several other amino acids also had unexpected effects. Notably, Arg correlated with decreased expression and, most surprisingly, solubility of bacterial proteins, an effect only partially attributable to rare codons. However, rare codons did significantly reduce expression despite use of a codon-enhanced strain. Additional analyses suggest that positively but not negatively charged amino acids may reduce translation efficiency in E. coli irrespective of codon usage. While some observed effects may reflect indirect evolutionary correlations, others may reflect basic physicochemical phenomena. We used these results to construct and validate predictors of expression and solubility levels and overall protein usability, and we propose new strategies to be explored for engineering improved protein expression and solubility.