About us

The project “PolRom: Identifying evidence-based methods to effectively combat discrimination of the Roma in the changing political climate of Europe” was funded by the Rights, Equality and Citizenship (REC) Programme (2014-2020) of the European Union. A follow up project “ENGAGE: Using contact interventions to promote engagement and mobilisation for social change” builds on and further extends PolRom findings. Find out more about ENGAGE here.

PolRom brought together an international team of social psychologists from five European countries committed to bringing about change in the situation of Roma people and Travellers in Europe. Within the PolRom project, we collaborated with local and international NGOs, state institutions and European stakeholders to address the challenges created by the current political climate of rising right-wing populism and identify effective methods to combat discrimination. You will find the information about our project on this website.

Our first objective was to identify how politicians and public figures talk about Roma people, how much space Roma people get to form the public opinion about them. In connection with this, we aimed to reveal how different political narratives impact current Roma and non-Roma relations (prejudice, discrimination, violence, as well as helping and anti-discrimination efforts).

Our second objective was to evaluate and improve existing anti-discrimination interventions in order to efficiently reduce prejudice towards the Roma in Europe. In order to attain these objectives, we carried out:

1. public opinion surveys in five participating countries (Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Ireland, France) investigating the connection between acceptance of different types of political discourses and the level of antigypsyism;
2. content analysis of how politicians talk about issues in connection with Roma people and Travellers;
3. experiments to identify effective areas of interventions;
4. systematic evaluation of existing anti-discrimination interventions to identify best practice examples.

Based on the results of the PolRom project and the latest findings of social psychology in the field of prejudice reduction, social change, and effective interventions, we developed a toolkit that will help to design new or improve existing anti-discrimination interventions.