# **1. Social exclusion as a process between people**

Around the world, one encounters negative attitudes toward people belonging to other groups. Such views are often expressed casually, in everyday conversations: “they are lazy” or “they’re not like us” are common expressions people use when referring to members of a particular race, caste, ethnic, or religious group. In isolation, such views may be relatively inconsequential. But once they are aggregated across large segments of a society, negative attitudes toward other groups can have wide-ranging consequences. In fact, aggregated and institutionalized negative attitudes underpin systematic processes of social exclusion. Negative attitudes and discriminatory behavior assign excluded groups an inferior or morally suspect status. Indeed, one group may even dehumanize other groups in order to justify their exclusion. Social exclusion operates in many domains, and involves a range of legal, social, economic, and political mechanisms that hinder development progress (de Haan 1999). Being subject to stereotypes and negative attitudes has profound impacts on the excluded, who may be blocked from accessing a variety of opportunities including employment and education. As a result, the excluded are often more vulnerable to poverty. Sometimes, the excluded internalize the negative attitudes and underperform, as demonstrated by research on lower caste individuals in India (Hoff and Pandey 2008). At other times, they respond with political mobilization, protest movements, or violence. Exclusion can therefore contribute to state fragility and conflict.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the values, attitudes and behaviors that drive social exclusion processes in developing and transition countries. We do this using a novel empirical analysis of a large multi-country data set on attitudes to other groups combined with a focused synthesis of the literature. Our starting point is that social exclusion is rooted in everyday social life, specifically in people’s attitudes and behaviors toward other groups they perceive as different to and less valuable than their own group. Using data covering the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, in addition to a few West European comparator countries, we analyze the responses to a simple hypothetical survey question about which specific groups respondents would _not_ like to have as neighbors.

We find that unwelcoming attitudes to other groups—immigrants, ethnic minorities, the poor, HIV+ individuals, homosexuals, and many others are surprisingly common and are comprised of three distinct sets of values. This finding allows us to propose a novel categorization of social exclusion attitudes: (1) intolerance for the poor and for different lifecycle stages; (2) intolerance toward stigmatized attributes and behaviors; and (3) intolerance to specific identity groups. In our data set, the second attitude cluster (related to stigmatized attributes and behaviors) is the most pronounced. The empirical analysis of the determinants of the three attitude clusters shows that country-specific factors are far more important than socio-economic characteristics. These findings could have important implications for theories about exclusion and for the design of appropriate social inclusion policies.

We use these findings to argue that tackling the norms and values that underpin exclusion should be an essential element of social inclusion strategies. While development policies and programs sometimes acknowledge norms and values, they rarely address them explicitly and systematically. Doing so requires an understanding of the origins, functions, and consequences of norms and values. It also requires a 2