Denigrating Democracy: How Partisan Competition Sparks Xenophobia in Lebanon

Denigrating Democracy: How Partisan Competition Sparks Xenophobia in Lebanon

Protection of minorities is a hallmark of liberal democracy, but partisan competition typically requires appealing to majoritarian groups. When do electoral incentives encourage candidates to target immigrant communities with racist or discriminatory rhetoric? This paper aims to address this question through a novel dataset of refugee-related Twitter posts by political elites in Lebanon, the country…