Support for the British National Party (BNP) has grown exponentially in the last decade. Using a leaked membership list, we locate over 12,000 members and match them with Census data on more than 200,000 neighbourhoods in Britain. Two established theories of ethnic hostility - contact and threat - provide opposing predictions about the effect of the proportion of minorities. These predictions are tested with a multilevel analysis of variation in the probability of white British adults belonging to the BNP. The probability is lower in neighbourhoods with a substantial proportion of non-whites. The probability is higher, by contrast, in cities with a larger proportion of non-whites, but only where they are also highly segregated. Within the non-white category, we find that South Asians matter rather than blacks; results for Muslims are similar. These findings show how contact and threat can be disentangled by considering different spatial scales, and also demonstrate the importance of segregation. © 2011 The Author 2011.
