Featured Faculty Research: Vicky Fouka

Vicky Fouka earned her PhD in Economics from Pompeu Fabra University in Spain and joined the department of Political Science at Stanford in 2015. She is a Hellman Faculty Scholar and her work is funded by the Russell Sage Foundation. Her research examines the dynamics of group identity, with a focus on immigrant assimilation and the drivers of out-group prejudice.

Specifically, she has been working on how assimilationist policies and discrimination affect immigrants’ sense of belonging and incentives to integrate in the host society, both from a historical perspective during the period of Mass Migration in the US and contemporarily in the case of Muslim immigrants in the US and Europe today. She finds that, while discrimination drives immigrant minorities to signal assimilation through observable actions (like adopting less ethnic-sounding names for their children), it also simultaneously decreases their trust and attachment to the host country. These effects are heterogeneous and depend on immigrants’ initial degree of integration – while both policy and native attitudes can drive the most assimilated immigrants to further distance themselves from their ethnic identity, it has the opposite effect for the least assimilated ones. These findings have implications for the dynamics of integration and suggest that policy and the actions of native populations may play a role in observed instances of radicalization and oppositional behavior on the part of immigrant minorities.

In her most recent work, Vicky examines the process through which in-group boundaries change to incorporate previous out-groups. In the context of the Great Migration, the large-scale movement of African Americans out of the US South to industrializing Northern urban centers, she shows that the appearance of a new salient out-group can lead to the assimilation of former outsiders, in this case white immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.

Vicky is broadly interested in the dynamics of culture and cultural transmission, both from a theoretical and an empirical point of view. At Stanford, she teaches courses on Political Culture and Immigration and Multiculturalism.