Erratum: Can Exposure to Celebrities Reduce Prejudice? The Effect of Mohamed Salah on Islamophobic Behaviors and Attitudes (American Political Science DOI: 10.1017/S0003055421000423)

Abstract

We regret that there was an error in one of the footnotes and the appendix of our recently published article: "Can Exposure to Celebrities Reduce Prejudice? The Effect of Mohamed Salah on Islamophobic Behaviors and Attitudes." Alrababa'h et al. (2021) write in Footnote 9: "Some may object to the hate crimes analysis because only about 39% of hate crimes targeted Muslims (see Appendix A)." Appendix A then explains this statistic: "the Home Office reports that 76% of hate crimes perpetrated from January 2017 to January 2018 were religiously or racially motivated. Of these crimes, 52% were categorized as anti-Muslim (BBC News 2018)." We initially calculated the 39% statistic by taking 52%of 76%(the percentage of hate crimes were racially or religiously motivated). However, we should have instead calculated 52% of just religiously motivated hate crimes. The appendix should therefore instead read: "Of religiously-motivated crimes, 52% were categorized as anti-Muslim in particular (BBC News 2018)." Religious hate crimes represent 9-22% of hate crimes nationwide as reported by two official sources, the Home Office's 2017-18 hate crime report (U.K. Home Office 2018) and the 2017-18 to 2019-20 Crime Survey for England and Wales (U.K. Home Office 2020), respectively. This suggests that anti-Muslim attacks make up 4-11% of recorded hate crimes, rather than 39%. Footnote 9 should therefore read: "Some may object to the hate crimes analysis because a minority of hate crimes target Muslims (See Appendix A)." Official statistics likely underestimate the true anti-Muslim hate crime rate, however, both because some hate crimes go unreported and because some crimes which are classified as solely racial may also be anti-Muslim in nature.