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National Trauma and the Fear of Foreigners: How Past Geopolitical Threat Heightens Anti-Immigration Sentiment Today
Abstract
This paper introduces a historical, macro-political argument into the literature on anti-immigration sentiment, which has mainly considered individual-level predictors such as education or social capital as well as country-level factors such as fluctuations in labor market conditions, changing composition of immigration streams, or the rise of populist parties. We argue that past geopolitical competition and war have shaped how national identities formed and thus also contemporary attitudes toward newcomers: countries that have experienced more violent conflict or lost territory and sovereignty developed ethnic (rather than civic) forms of nationalism and thus show higher levels of anti-immigration sentiment today. We introduce a geopolitical threat scale and score 33 European countries based on their historical experiences. Two anti-immigration measures come from the European Social Survey. Mixed-effects, ordinal logistic regression models reveal strong statistical and substantive significance for the geopolitical threat scale. Furthermore, ethnic forms of national identification do seem to mediate this relationship between geopolitical threat and restrictionist attitudes. The main analysis is robust to a wide variety of model specifications, to the inclusion of all control variables known to affect anti-immigration attitudes, and to a series of alternative codings of the geopolitical threat scale. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.
... Indeed, most contemporary conflicts involve territorial issues (Huth 1996), including but not limited to irredentist claims between states (such as in contemporary Ukraine), secessionist domestic conflict (Spain or Turkey) or contested sovereignty (Kosovo). International relations scholarship therefore conceptualizes geopolitical threat based on each country's history of territory or sovereignty loss and the internal or external conflicts as a reaction to such threats (Hiers, Soehl, Wimmer 2017). Realists also believe that states that appear aggressive can make others react with the goal of strengthening their alliances against this perceived threat. ...
... Geopolitical Threat (GPT): In order to measure geopolitical threat, this article uses Hiers et al. (2017)'s data. In their conceptualization of geopolitical threat, territory and sovereignty are the main pivots of the modern world order of nation-states (Wimmer 2002). ...
... In their conceptualization of geopolitical threat, territory and sovereignty are the main pivots of the modern world order of nation-states (Wimmer 2002). Hiers, Soehl, Wimmer (2017) distinguish two dimensions of geopolitical threat: losses of territory and/or sovereignty and the threat of losing such due to undergoing internal or external conflict. More specifically this means that there are two types of actual loss of territory or independence, as well as two types of potential loss due to conflict, external and internal. ...
Employing a most-similar case design, the study examines Finland’s and New Zealand’s soft power actions to answer the question, why did Finland use more soft power than New Zealand during 1995–2010? The article focuses on geopolitical threat to reveal why Finland is such a high soft power user, and New Zealand is not, when these two countries should have exhibited similar levels of soft power use. The qualitative analysis finds that a strong perception of a geopolitical threat boosted Finland’s soft power use, while the absence of a similar threat for New Zealand led to a low soft power use.
... Indeed, most contemporary conflicts involve territorial issues (Huth 1996), including but not limited to irredentist claims between states (such as in contemporary Ukraine), secessionist domestic conflict (Spain or Turkey) or contested sovereignty (Kosovo). International relations scholarship therefore conceptualizes geopolitical threat based on each country's history of territory or sovereignty loss and the internal or external conflicts as a reaction to such threats (Hiers, Soehl, Wimmer 2017). Realists also believe that states that appear aggressive can make others react with the goal of strengthening their alliances against this perceived threat. ...
... Geopolitical Threat (GPT): In order to measure geopolitical threat, this article uses Hiers et al. (2017)'s data. In their conceptualization of geopolitical threat, territory and sovereignty are the main pivots of the modern world order of nation-states (Wimmer 2002). ...
... In their conceptualization of geopolitical threat, territory and sovereignty are the main pivots of the modern world order of nation-states (Wimmer 2002). Hiers, Soehl, Wimmer (2017) distinguish two dimensions of geopolitical threat: losses of territory and/or sovereignty and the threat of losing such due to undergoing internal or external conflict. More specifically this means that there are two types of actual loss of territory or independence, as well as two types of potential loss due to conflict, external and internal. ...
Using statistical analysis of 29 European democracies, this article looks at the impact of geopolitical threat on democracies’ soft power reliance. For the time-period of 1999–2010, geopolitical threat is a statistically significant variable that boosts soft power use. This geopolitical theory posits that political elite create a narrative that focuses on national security and start to rely on a higher level of soft power to balance against threats. The findings provide answers regarding countries’ alliance-building processes as well as suggest that the three main paradigms of international relations are more compatible than previously stated.
... This allows us to account for effects of geopolitical threat that are heterogeneous within and across dimensions. Beyond its effects on pride, we expect higher degrees of national trauma will tighten membership criteria (following Hiers et al. 2017; see also Feinstein and Bonikowski 2019). Yet, the meaning of these shifts is difficult to fully understand when analyzing dimensions separately. ...
... We know younger people are less proud of their countries than their elders, and the less educated are more attached to their nations than the better educated. Concerning the membership dimension, we know youth, higher education, and higher socioeconomic status are associated with more tolerant attitudes toward immigration (Hainmueller and Hiscox 2010;Hiers et al. 2017). Finally, religious individuals might have different attachments to the nation than do non-religious people in some cases (Wimmer 2017b). ...
... Wimmer 2017a), nor does it linearly yield an "ethnicization" of citizenship where membership is defined in terms of ancestry (cf. Hiers et al. 2017). Our results are therefore in line with arguments that suggest a focus on common descent is too narrow an indicator to usefully capture distinct understandings of nationalism (e.g., Brubaker 2004:136); and "ethnic" nationalism is not uniquely exclusionist when compared to "civic" nationalism (Brubaker 2004), an argument since supported in empirical work by Simonsen and Bonikowski (2019). ...
Geopolitical competition and conflict play a central role in canonical accounts of the emergence of nation-states and national identities. Yet work in this tradition has paid little attention to variation in everyday, popular understandings of nationhood. We propose a macro-historical argument to explain cross-national variation in the types of popular nationalism expressed at the individual level. Our analysis builds on recent advances on the measurement of popular nationalism and a recently introduced geopolitical threat scale (Hiers, Soehl, and Wimmer 2017). With the use of latent class analysis and a series of regression models, we show that a turbulent geopolitical past decreases the prevalence of liberal nationalism (pride in institutions, inclusive boundaries) while increasing the prevalence of restrictive nationalism (less pride in institutions, exclusive boundaries) across 43 countries around the world. Additional analyses suggest the long-term development of institutions is a key mediating variable: states with a less traumatic geopolitical history tend to have more established liberal democratic institutions, which in turn foster liberal forms of popular nationalism.
... Therefore, immigrants are considered a significant threat to this identity. This is not very different from what Hiers et al. (2017) argued in their geopolitical threat scale in that individuals in countries that have experienced internal or external conflict and/or loss of territory/sovereignty will be more hostile towards foreigners. This is because the boundaries of the national community in countries with a long history of conflict are more defined by ethnic descent and common culture and language than by the institution of citizenship connecting the population to the state (Hiers et al., 2017:363). ...
... What seems clear is that several of the countries in the Balkans that are not EU members, such as Albania, (Gorodzeisky, 2021;Hiers et al., 2017). However, our extended study of attitudes towards immigration in post-communist countries does not support the argument that individuals in these contexts are more sceptical of immigrants. ...
Most studies on anti‐immigrant attitudes have been conducted within the US or in Western European countries. As a result, the theoretical frameworks utilised to comprehend these attitudes are often based on a limited subset of the global population. Hence, it remains uncertain how these theories apply to regions beyond the Western context. Based on the Life in Transition Survey, we explore whether the theories and factors discussed in Western contexts can be applied to understanding anti‐immigrant attitudes in 28 post‐communist countries. We find that the impact of macroeconomic variables in the post‐communist region differs from what would be expected based on existing theoretical frameworks. The study adds complexity to the debates surrounding the positive impacts of modernisation, economic development and democratisation on anti‐immigrant attitudes. Our research suggests that intolerance levels are notably highest in Central and Eastern European EU countries. Interestingly, these levels are higher than those found in less developed and less democratic post‐communist countries outside the EU. This study highlights the difficulty of deploying a comprehensive theoretical framework that can account for the complexities of attitudes across a broad range of countries.
... Attention to the micro-level link between education and attitudes toward immigrants or immigration policy is a mainstay in the broader literature (Alba, Rumbaut, and Marotz 2005). Despite the emphasis in academic work on micro-level correlates such as education, social contact, or religion, Social Forces' publications are distinguished for revealing how broader community, regional, and national-level conditions shape social attitudes (McLaren 2003;Ziller 2015;Steele 2016;Hiers, Soehl, and Wimmer 2017). Hiers, Soehl, and Wimmer's (2017) study of anti-immigration sentiment is a significant contribution to the broader literature on social attitudes and immigration, especially because it carefully incorporates contextual effects into the analysis. ...
... Despite the emphasis in academic work on micro-level correlates such as education, social contact, or religion, Social Forces' publications are distinguished for revealing how broader community, regional, and national-level conditions shape social attitudes (McLaren 2003;Ziller 2015;Steele 2016;Hiers, Soehl, and Wimmer 2017). Hiers, Soehl, and Wimmer's (2017) study of anti-immigration sentiment is a significant contribution to the broader literature on social attitudes and immigration, especially because it carefully incorporates contextual effects into the analysis. Hiers and colleagues draw on data from all participant countries in the European Social Survey from 2003 through 2010 to analyze nativeborn respondents' views on whether or not migrants of a different racial/ethnic background or from poorer non-European countries should be admitted. ...
... Aside from migrant stock, individual characteristics (e.g., sociotropic/egotropic economic concerns, education, intergroup contact) have been analyzed in relation to outgroup attitudes (Fussell, 2014;Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2014). Others have considered macro (country level) variables such as economic conditions (Wilkes, Guppy, & Farris, 2008), media coverage (Czymara & Dochow, 2018), history of war (Hiers, Soehl, & Wimmer, 2017), group relative deprivation (Meuleman et al., 2019), human security (Young, Loebachb, & Korinek, 2018), misperception of immigrant population size (Gorodzeisky & Semyonov, 2018), and immigration policy (Schlueter, Meuleman, & Davidov, 2013). ...
... A few notable exceptions are worth mentioning. First is an article by Hiers et al. (2017) investigating the impact of past "national trauma" on anti-immigrant attitudes using the European Social Survey. According to them, countries that experienced more violent conflicts and a loss of territory/sovereignty are more likely to form ethnic (as opposed to civic) nationalism, resulting in higher levels of xenophobia today (see also Soehl and Karim, 2021). ...
Existing research shows that anti-immigrant attitudes are driven by a wide variety of individual- and contextual-level factors. The present study introduces “societal violence”—the degree to which human rights are violated and physical survival is threatened in society—as a significant, yet neglected, explanatory concept in analyzing negative attitudes toward immigrants. Data are drawn from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 2013. Two-level mixed effects models are estimated with random intercepts and slopes. Results show that societal violence significantly moderates the magnitude of the relationships between measures of national identification and negative sentiment toward immigrant among 27 280 respondents across 29 low- and high-income countries. More specifically, the associations are found to be greater in less violent societies.
... The existing literature on (negative) attitudes toward immigrants reveals two primary mechanisms-material and ethnic/cultural-that shape the perception of others in a transnational context where nation provides an overarching narrative in public discourse (Mughan and Paxton 2006;Hiers, Soehl, and Wimmer 2017;Ceobanu and Escandell 2008;Semyonov, Raijman, and Gorodzeisky 2006). Viewing themselves as the guardians of economic/material welfare or ethnic/cultural integrity, members of a dominant class employ material or ethnic rhetoric to frame the images of immigrants or foreigners. ...
... In contrast, the Eastern view of nationalism pays meticulous attention to the ethnic nature of a nation-state. This view has an emotional resonance: when citizenship is defined by one's affiliation with a dominant ethnic group, negative sentiments toward immigrants are used to display natives' cultural supremacy over others (Hiers et al. 2017). Emotional defensiveness fueled by radical nationalism suggests that the very presence of outsiders in a nation-state is illegitimate simply because of their alienness. ...
Based on more than 280,000 newspaper articles published in North America, this study proposes an integrative machine learning framework to explore heterogeneous social sentiments over time. After retrieving and preprocessing articles containing the term “Chinese” from six mainstream newspapers, we identified major discussion topics and assigned articles to their corresponding topics via posterior probabilities estimated by using a novel Bayesian nonparametric model, the hierarchical Dirichlet process. We also employed a groundbreaking deep learning technique, bidirectional encoder representations from transformers, to assign a negative or positive sentiment score to each newspaper article, which was trained on binary-labeled movie reviews from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). By combining state-of-the-art tools for topic modeling and sentiment analysis, we found an overall lack of consensus on whether sentiments in North America since 1978 were pro- or anti-Chinese. Moreover, the images of Chinese are highly topic specific: (1) sentiments across different topics show distinct trajectories over the period of study; (2) discussion topics explain much more of the variation in sentiments than do the publisher, year of publication, or country of publisher; (3) less positive sentiments appear to be more relevant to material concerns than to ethnic considerations, whereas more positive sentiments are associated with an appreciation of culture; and (4) sentiments on the same or similar topic might exhibit different temporal patterns in the United States and Canada. These new findings not only suggest a multifaceted and dynamic view of social sentiments in a transnational context but also call for a paradigm shift in understanding intertwined sociodiscursive interactions over time.
... The literature suggests that exclusionist attitudes are produced by perceived economic and cultural threat, not immigrant crime: the more people feel secure about their social status, the more they support multiculturalism (Berry, 2017). Contextual variation in immigration attitudes is also relatively constant over time (Hiers et al., 2017;Van de Vijver et al., 2008). The variation in Figure 3 indeed overlaps with broader, historically determined cultural variation. ...
... Multiculturalism developed as a progressive ideology, and increases when people feel securer about their social status, which education and income promote (cf. Berry, 2017;Hiers et al., 2017). We assume that ethnically diverse municipalities (for which % non-Western immigrants is a proxy) are more tolerant because of self-selection and adaptation to diversity. ...
There is considerable international and local-level variation in immigrant crime. In this article, we propose a theoretical model to better understand that contextual variation. Furthermore, we present the results of our first attempts to empirically assess the validity of the framework, focussing on local-level variation in crime among residents of Turkish or Moroccan origin in the Netherlands. The proposed model connects Berry's acculturation theory to criminological theories, using relevant findings from the immigration acculturation literature as starting points. It theorises that host societies with a ‘multicultural acculturation orientation’ tend to reduce immigrant crime by fostering informal social control and attenuating criminogenic strains. The empirical analyses explore whether local-level variation in multicultural attitudes among the native-Dutch indeed predicts municipal variation in the number of registered suspected crimes among first- and second-generation immigrants, focussing on men of Turkish or Moroccan origin residing in 35 Dutch cities. The empirical analyses are based on a unique database that combines aggregated survey data, which were used to measure natives’ acculturation attitudes, with administrative microdata, including micro-level police data. Evidence is found for a protective effect of local-level multiculturalism for first-generation immigrant crime in particular, especially for immigrant men living in larger local immigrant communities. We also find stronger effects for the more cohesive and societally accepted Turkish-Dutch group than for the more fragmented and excluded Moroccan-Dutch.
... There is an ongoing, worldwide debate around ideology-the moral globalist versus the nationalist. While these two groups are found internationally, these are internal fights within their respective nations (Hiers, Soehl, and Wimmer, 2017). Indeed, the refugee may be portrayed as the (foreign) enemy, but for these nationalists, their internal enemy-the Sicilian or Italian global moralist-is actually the bigger threat, as it is ultimately the part of the State that allows or prohibits migrant ships from arriving. ...
... Nationalists do so by keeping arancini for themselves and rejecting its international origins as well as the migrants. They believe they were preserving Sicilian culture from outside forces that would destroy the island (Hiers, Soehl, and Wimmer, 2017). As stated, global moralist Sicilians believe that offering arancini, and food in general, reinforced the Sicilian obligation of hospitality, to help those in need and/or to travelers. ...
In August of 2018, the Italian national government prohibited North African passengers onboard the Diciotti from disembarking in Catania, Sicily. The ship had docked amid an ongoing debate over how Italy should respond to an increasing number of immigrants and refugees arriving to the nation's shores. Pro-migrant Sicilians came to the dock wielding arancini-fried rice balls-which are emblematic of the island's history and culture, as a way to symbolically welcome the migrants onboard the Diciotti. Nationalist Sicilians came as well to counter-protest the pro-migrant group. This paper asks first, who are the opposing groups (pro-migrant and nationalist Sicilians) and why did they adopt arancini? Second, how does arancini become a symbol of welcome and at the same time inhospitality? Third, how does the encounter become a stage for the larger debate over the meaning of identity in Sicily? By shifting the focus towards the host population and how it contests the meanings of such important local symbols, we capture the complexities of reception and debates over how natives perceive and receive migrants.
... Secondly, many previous studies are cross-sectional in design; they are unable to separate the effects of immigration on subsequent opinion from the reverse effects of opinion on subsequent flows of immigration (for example, via political pressure and policy changes). Thirdly, cross-sectional designs cannot adequately deal with possible country-specific confounds, such as national experiences with immigration that date back to at least the mid-twentieth century (for example, Castles, de Haas and Miller 2014;Hiers, Soehl and Wimmer 2017). Finally, there are two quite distinct forms of immigration opinion that must be considered: (1) positive or negative perceptions of, or orientations to, immigration and (2) the relative salience of the issue (Dennison and Geddes 2019;Jennings 2009). ...
... 6 We focus on cross-time, within-country trends in immigration opinion rather than, for instance, subnational or other subgroup comparison. Though these additional levels of analysis could provide interesting insights into the evolution of public opinion regarding immigration, we investigate trends at the national level, especially given that in most European countries, immigration policy (and immigrant policy) is set at the national level, and national-level historical experiences have been shown to be important in determining immigration opinions (Hiers, Soehl and Wimmer 2017). It is also likely that the most relevant subnational level itself varies by country (see Kaufmann and Goodwin 2018). ...
After decades of relatively high inflows of foreign nationals, immigration is now at the center of substantial political divisions in most European countries and has been implicated in one of the most vexing developments in European politics, the rise of the xenophobic right. However, it is not clear whether high levels of immigration actually do cause a public backlash, or whether publics become habituated to, and supportive of, immigration. This study tests these backlash and habituation theories using novel measures of immigration mood and immigration concern produced by combining over 4,000 opinion datapoints across twenty-nine years and thirty countries. The authors find evidence of a public backlash in the short to medium run, where mood turns negative and concern about immigration rises. Yet the study also finds evidence of a longer-run process of habituation that cancels out the backlash effect within one (concern) to three (mood) decades.
... The idea of cultural persistence and its long-term impacts has gained support from several empirical studies (Abbott 2005;Putnam 2007;Nunn 2008;Hiers et al. 2017;Acharya et al. 2016;Harold and Fong 2017). For example, Nunn (2008) found a negative relationship between the slave trade and current economic development in South America. ...
... Recently, using qualitative data, sociologists Harold and Fong (2017) found that historical memory passed on by family members influences where Jewish people in Canada choose to live. Regarding xenophobic attitudes, Hiers et al. (2017) found that the relationship between historical political situations and xenophobia is significant in Europe. ...
Many studies have addressed how current immigrant size affects the strength of xenophobia from the perspectives of intergroup contact and ethnic competition theories. Can native residents’ current xenophobia be explained by historical immigrant size? To explore this question, we use historical immigrant size and a survey dataset to investigate the long-term effects of historical immigrant size on current xenophobia in Japan. The results show that historical immigrant size increases current xenophobia in Japan, which may be due to previous negative contact experiences between immigrants and native residents, and the negative effects persist. The implications of these findings for our understanding of the relationship between immigrant size and xenophobia are discussed.
... Ethnic groups that have endured historical traumas involving loss or threat to sovereignty and territory, such as in the case of Hungary 1 , may perceive their survival uncertain and feel under siege. This perception can give rise to a persistent and generalized vigilance towards other groups (Hirschberger, 2018), contributing to the heightening and tightening of national borders and stronger ethnocentrism (Hiers et al., 2017), and the justification of institutional and national systems (Liu et al., 2021;Liu & Hilton, 2005). In a recent study (Vincze et al., 2021), we found that Hungarian participants, who exclusively selected negative events from the last 100 years as the most significant historical events, were more inclined to endorse conspiracy theories and engage in system justification than those with a more diverse perspective on the noteworthy events. ...
The current study explores the psychological mechanisms underlying the relationship between collective
victimhood beliefs and defensive strategies, including conspiracy theory conditioned on temporality and
system justification. Drawing on a sample of 223 participants, the study distinguishes between historical
and comparative victimhood beliefs and examines the mediating role of group-level worldviews – specifically
distrust, perceived injustice, and vulnerability. Using path analysis, the findings reveal that historical
victimhood beliefs are more strongly associated with defensive strategies compared to comparative victimhood
beliefs, emphasizing the role of cultural and historical context in shaping these effects. Distrust
emerged as a dominant mediator for historical conspiracy theories, while perceived injustice mediated
the effect of historical victim beliefs on contemporary conspiracy theories. Notably, vulnerability did not
mediate conspiracy theories but was linked to system justification through a negative association. These
results underscore the nuanced interplay between collective victim beliefs, worldviews, and defensive
strategies, shedding light on the socio-political implications of historical traumas in intergroup relations
and public discourse.
... Structural inequalities, oppression, economic disparities, language barriers, and occupational exposure may also account for evidence that people from minoritised ethnic groups are more susceptible to increasing temperatures in Global North nations (Hansen et al., 2013). Those subjected to racism experience heightened vulnerability to the consequences of the CEE (IPCC, 2014), and are subject to shifts to ethno-nationalist policies (such as anti-immigration sentiment) that result from geopolitical insecurity (Hiers et al., 2017). Disabled people face the threat of worsened inequity of access to resources amid the CEE (Gaskin et al., 2017), and disabled people are also at greater risk to the acute impacts of climate breakdown, often through being unable to leave their homes or access resources without adequate support (Disability Rights UK, n.d.). ...
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... Overall, similar to studies conducted in America and Europe, our findings highlight the ways in which in-group favoritism driven by a strong ethno-religious identity strengthens the positive evaluation and inclusion of in-group populations and negative evaluations and exclusion of out-group populations who are perceived as outsiders and therefore not worthy of inclusion in the host society (Ben-Nun Bloom et al. 2015b;Hiers et al. 2017). Israel differs from most other Western societies in two relevant factors associated with public opinion towards immigrants. ...
This study focuses on the impact of three attributes of migrants – their reasons for migration, religion, and level of religiosity – on public support for allowing migrants to come and live in Israel. We rely on a factorial survey that was conducted in a representative sample of the Israeli Jewish population analyzing the assessments of 600 respondents of various vignettes (N = 3,595) of hypothetical migrants about admitting them to the country. The findings reveal that Israeli Jews do not evaluate all immigrant groups equally. Preferences for specific groups of migrants are primarily structured along two main attributes: religion and reasons for migration. The result is a hierarchical distinction between immigrants of Jewish ancestry and those who are non-Jewish. Jewish repatriates are perceived as “deserving migrants” who can make legitimate claims about belonging to the host society. As such, they enjoy an ethno-religious premium based on ancestral rights. By contrast, there is less support for the entry of non-Jewish migrants, whether asylum seekers or labor migrants, as their presence is viewed as a threat to the Jewish character of the state and the hegemony of the Jewish majority. The impact of the immigrants’ attributes on attitudes varies based on the level of religiosity of the Jewish population, especially in the case of non-Jewish migrants. Support is stronger in the case of secular respondents and much weaker among their more religious counterparts. The findings are discussed in light of existing theories.
... Such an aftereffect is not uncommon. For instance, it has been shown that past processes of nation-building influence contemporary anti-immigrant attitudes (Hiers et al., 2017). ...
This article complements existing victimological studies on religion by investigating whether religion promotes or reduces fear of crime in Germany. According to the generalized insecurity approach and the theory of social production functions, religion and fear of crime are linked via secularization-induced diffuse insecurities. It is expected that different facets of religion are tied to fearing crime in different ways because the projection of secularization-induced diffuse insecurities occurs only among those individuals whose religious capital is devaluated. Empirical analyses of data from the 2021 German General Social Survey reveal that some religious minority groups are particularly likely to fear crime, religious belief is positively related to fearing crime, and religious behavior is negatively associated with fearing crime. Additionally, religion can promote fear of crime equally in East and West Germany. In conclusion, the study emphasizes the significance of religion in relation to the fear of crime and underscores the benefits of a general theoretical approach.
... For instance, some scholarships suggest that national trauma shapes anti-immigration views. Here, studies suggest that historical legacies of geo-political conflicts that involved violence and territorial losses may shape present opposition to immigration (Hiers et al., 2017). ...
Scholarship on immigrant stereotypes suggest that individuals’ viewpoints toward immigration may be differentiated across the dimensions of culture and economics. In this study, we use latent class analysis, which avoids the assumption that attitudes are unidimensional, scalar, and polarized, to examine configurations of immigration attitudes in Europe from 2002 through 2010, a period of time leading up to and within the Great Recession. Analyzing a set of items capturing different aspects of immigration attitudes, we discover that although there are substantial segments of the European population who hold polarized anti- or pro-immigration attitudes, the most common viewpoint is ambivalence. Specifically, those with ambivalent attitudes feel that immigration enriches national culture but also believe that immigration has less benefits for the economy. Using an interrupted time series design, we explore how attitudinal configurations shifted with the onset of the Great Recession. The crisis coincided with a rise in ambivalent attitudes as economic threat grew more than concerns about culture.
... Бұрынғы геосаяси бәсекелестіктер мен соғыстар ұлттық бірегейлікті, мигранттарға сәйкес қазіргі заманғы қатынасты қалыптастырды: зорлық-зомбылықпен қақтығысты бастан өткерген немесе жері мен егемендігін жоғалтқан елдер ұлтшылдықтың этникалық (азаматтық емес) түрлерін дамытып, нәтижесінде иммиграцияға қарсылықтың жоғары сезім деңгейін көрсетті [75]. ...
«Ұлттану» оқулығы автордың «Нациология» оқулығы негізінде жасалған, бірақ мазмұнының құрамында және мәтініне өзгеріс еңгізілген. Оқулық оқушылардың ұлттық процестерді талдау саласындағы жалпы кәсіби құзыреттіліктерін және олардың әлеуметтану мен әлеуметтік ғылымдар білім саласындағы аналитикалық құзыреттерін тиісті білім беру бағдарламалары бойынша дамытуға бағытталған.
... Therefore, we would expect societies with a higher level of education to generate lesser anti-immigrant attitudes and lower discrimination. However, attitudes against immigrants can be rooted in the host country's history and culture (Hiers et al. 2017). The remote origin of these attitudes is often uncertain, but it is easy to detect them in a country's intolerance towards ethnocultural groups other than its own. ...
This article intended to compare the discrimination perceived, respectively, by Muslim and non-Muslim immigrants in Europe, and investigate its determinants. Data covered six European Social Surveys and fourteen countries. The study found that the perception of being discriminated against is much more widespread among Muslim immigrants. The paper also found vast demo-socioeconomic heterogeneities between Muslim and non-Muslim immigrants. Consequently, the hypothesis was advanced that those heterogeneities were responsible for the discrimination differential between the two groups. In order to test this hypothesis, the present study used a statistical decomposition model rather than the procedures usually employed to analyse perceived discrimination. It emerged that demo-socioeconomic dissimilarities (in age, education, unemployment, income etc.) between Muslim and non-Muslim immigrants do not explain their gap in perceived discrimination. Nor is the gap eliminated by controlling for the host country’s features, economic conditions and native hostility included. Instead, it emerged that identical individual traits—such as second generation, age, and income—are accompanied by opposite outcomes of perceived discrimination in the two groups. These divergent outcomes, in turn, are associated with deep-rooted characteristics of the immigrants’ cultural identity. These findings suggest that these characteristics can be more impactful than the immigrants’ socioeconomic status and the host country’s features and that, ultimately, immigrants’ shared in-group values play a more prominent role in the discrimination perceived by ethnic-religious groups than usually assumed by current literature.
... R ESEARCHERS from across the social sciences have paid increasing attention to the contemporary legacies of long-gone pasts. Sociologists Hiers, Soehl, and Wimmer (2017), for example, show that the populations of countries with a conflictual and painful history of state formation are more hostile to immigrants today. According to political scientist Woodberry (2012), where Protestant missionaries were active in the colonial dependencies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, democracy has a higher chance to take roots today. ...
This article introduces the concept of multiple, layered, and interacting histories, which opens four new avenues of research. We can ask which types of institutions or events, such as states, religions, or war, are more likely to leave a historical legacy. We can also explore why only certain states, religions, or wars leave legacies. We can compare the consequences of older and newer layers of history, such as of a series of successor states. Finally, these layers may interact with each other by preserving, neutralizing, or amplifying each other's effects. To illustrate these new research avenues, I use measurements of value orientations as well as generalized trust from the European Social Survey as dependent variables. New data on the history of states as well as the wars fought since 1500 are combined with existing data on the medieval policies of the Church, all coded at the level of 411 European regions. A series of regression models suggests that the political history of states is more consequential for contemporary attitudes than medieval religious policies or wars, that older layers of states can be as impactful as more recent ones, that interactions between layers are frequent, and that modern nation-states are more likely to leave a legacy than other types of polities.
... Importantly, see also García-Faroldi, 2017;Kauff et al., 2013) show that being socialised in a more heterogenous society creates more pro-immigration attitudes. Individuals socialised in countries with strong ethnic, rather than civic or multicultural, identities have been shown to be less supportive of immigration (Van Assche et al., 2017;Levanon & Lewin-Epstein, 2010;Hiers et al., 2017;at the individual level, see McAllister, 2018), as have those in which there is a strong collective rather than individualist culture (Meeusen & Kern, 2016;Shin & Dovidio, 2016). ...
Migration and migration-related diversity are likely to remain key topics of the European policy and research agenda for the foreseeable future. This asks for a rethinking of the research agenda on migration, from a strategic perspective as well as from a research perspective. The objective of this chapter is to suggest applications that are useful in shaping the next funding opportunities for migration research, and to provide roadmaps for the optimisation of research efforts in order to avoid overlapping and, where possible, to close the gaps in the global spectrum and national initiatives on migration. Questions such as How to benefit from and get access to available knowledge and expertise? How to promote the accumulation of knowledge and expertise? and How to address gaps in knowledge? have been at the heart of the Horizon 2020 CrossMigration research project and have led to the definition of its strategic research agenda . This chapter considers the need for a future agenda on migration studies, addressing methodological issues; what funding to focus on; how funding might be organised; who should be involved in funding (and procedures); and what prospects there are for the future. We will also propose three strategies to consider how an agenda might help provide towards: (1) keeping the road safe for achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals in 2030, (2) contrasting current and future pandemic/epidemic disease, and (3) establishing a fruitful dialogue with the African scientific community.
... Importantly, see also García-Faroldi, 2017;Kauff et al., 2013) show that being socialised in a more heterogenous society creates more pro-immigration attitudes. Individuals socialised in countries with strong ethnic, rather than civic or multicultural, identities have been shown to be less supportive of immigration (Van Assche et al., 2017;Levanon & Lewin-Epstein, 2010;Hiers et al., 2017;at the individual level, see McAllister, 2018), as have those in which there is a strong collective rather than individualist culture (Meeusen & Kern, 2016;Shin & Dovidio, 2016). ...
This chapter will focus on labour migration , that is the movement of persons with the aim of employment or income-bringing activities (e.g., entrepreneurship), developing the topic which was also touched upon in Chap. 10.1007/978-3-030-92377-8_3 on conceptual understanding of migration drivers. Research on labour migration has developed across various disciplines (e.g., sociology, anthropology, and geography), but most prominently in economics. It has resulted in a range of theoretical frameworks, starting with neoclassical economic theories and advancing through the New Economics of Labour Migration (NELM), dual labour market theory, and social network theory, to more recent transnational approaches or theories dedicated to particular forms of labour migration. These diverse approaches offer insights into labour migration on macro-, meso- and micro-levels. Although a dichotomy based on skills (high-skilled vs. low-skilled workers) can be seen as controversial or misleading as a division between workers representing these two types of skills is often vague or difficult to determine, the distinction does reflect recent debates on labour migration. Thus, a high−/low-skills dichotomy serves as a guide to the structure of this chapter.
... Ongoing xenophobic attitudes and anti-immigrant sentiments, fueled by misinformation of facts (see Anti-Defamation League, 2016), have created a heightened sense of fear, mistrust, and psychological distress among immigrant communities and other marginalized groups (Hiers, Soehl, & Wimmer, 2017;Tobar, 2017;Yee, 2017). Moreover, the current Trump administration continues to put forth harsh policies, including changes to regulations that require ICE to detain pregnant women (Sacchetti, 2018). ...
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... For example, based on a large cross-national dataset, nativist values and beliefs are shown to be positively associated with anti-immigrant attitudes (Ariely, 2011;Ceobanu & Escandell, 2010). Identification with nationalistic narratives in the Middle East (Feinstein & Bonikowski, 2019) and ethnicity-based national identity in Europe (Hiers, Soehl, & Wimmer, 2017) also strongly predict negative sentiments toward foreign-born populations. In addition, strong feelings of ethnic nationalism similarly raise xenophobic tendencies in Eurasia (Herrera & Kraus, 2016), as well as in Africa (Kersting, 2009). ...
Using the latest (fourth) wave of Asian Barometer Survey (2014–2016), this study examines how national pride and two types of trust (general and particular) are related to nativist preference (cultural nativism), independent of anti-immigration attitudes, among citizens in East and Southeast Asian countries. Findings from multilevel models show that, at the individual level, national pride and particular trust are positively related to cultural nativism, while general trust is negatively related. At the subnational-regional level, we also find significant contextual effects. Living in geographic areas with greater national pride is positively associated with nativist preference, as is residency in places with higher levels of particular trust. In contrast, residency in subnational contexts with higher levels of general trust is negatively associated. Finally, the association between national pride and cultural nativism is stronger in regions with greater contextual national pride.
... Accordingly, Quillian (1995Quillian ( , 1996 highlights a lack of studies on the important historical components of dominant groups' animosity towards outgroups. In parallel, Hiers et al. (2017) claim that past geopolitical conflicts and territory losses can foster a strong form of national identification and an increased level of animosity towards people seen as non-nationals. They classify Turkey as one of the most risk-averse countries among a data set of 33, which could influence the perception of Armenians. ...
This paper scrutinizes the role of Turkish politicians’ threat perception on negative descriptions of Armenians between 1960 and 1980. In so doing, it brings together the theoretical insights of group position theory with the scholarship on the perception of non-Muslim minorities in Turkey. Building on a comprehensive, mixed-method content analysis of Turkish parliamentary proceedings, it demonstrates that Turkish politicians are more likely to make negative comments about Armenians while debating about national security and foreign threats than when speaking about other topics. The paper concludes that perceived threats contribute to the negative descriptions of Armenians in Turkish politics.
... This run-of-the-mill approach prevails in studies aiming to explain migration policy preferences (e.g. Bohman and Hjerm 2016;Citrin et al. 1997;Hainmueller and Hiscox 2007;Hiers, Soehl, and Wimmer 2017;Sides and Citrin 2007), a thematic dimension on which large public-domain datasets, such as the European Social Survey, provide a nuanced range of head-on items. Even if unobtrusive indicators were available as readily, they are rather ill-suited for delivering dependents of explanatory models: the anonymity guarantee awarded by ICT and similar procedures comes at the price of severing any tie between individual respondents, on one hand, and scores of the sensitive item, on the other. ...
Extant scholarship on attitudes toward immigration and immigrants relies mostly on direct survey items. Thus, little is known about the scope of social desirability bias, and even less about its covariates. In this paper, we use probability-based mixed-modes panel data collected in the Southern Spanish region of Andalusia to estimate anti-immigrant sentiment with both the item-count technique, also known as list experiment, and a direct question. Based on these measures, we gauge the size of social desirability bias, compute predictor models for both estimators of anti-immigrant sentiment, and pinpoint covariates of bias. For most respondent profiles, the item-count technique produces higher estimates of anti-immigrant sentiment than the direct question, suggesting that self-presentational concerns are far more ubiquitous than previously assumed. However, we also find evidence that among people keen to position themselves as all-out xenophiles, social desirability pressures persist in the list-experiment: the full scope of anti-immigrant sentiment remains elusive even in non-obtrusive measurement.
... Historically, many Asian countries have maintained ethno-state status until colonization and did not receive much immigration until recently. According to Hiers, Soehl, and Wimmer (2017), "traumatic national history" such as loss of territory and independence is significantly related to more ethnic rather than civic identity and increases anti-immigrant attitude in turn. Indeed, Barcelo (2016), by incorporating national pride in analyzing Asian/Pacific countries, found significant negative associations with personal views on immigrants and immigration policy. ...
A large body of research exists concerning determinants of public opinion on immigration and immigrants, primarily based on Western countries. Given that South–South migratory flows have increased dramatically in recent decades, we contribute to the literature by analyzing cross-national probability data in the Asian context. Using multilevel modeling, we derive and test economic and cultural hypotheses concerning natives’ support for restrictive immigration policy. Results show that at the individual level, along with xenophobic tendency, personal financial insecurity, unequal material distribution in society, and sociotropic economic concern all significantly predict the outcome. As a theoretical contribution, contextual effects are also reported: living in a subnational region with more national pride and with higher parochialism is positively associated with it.
... In sum, we argue that post-socialist ethnification in Croatia and the collective experience of war-affected representations of "us" and "them", which consequently shape attitudes toward immigrants and immigration (cf. Hiers, Soehl, and Wimmer 2017). ...
The model of ethnification posits that in post-socialist contexts ethnic identities are used as a source for political mobilization against ethnic outgroups. In Croatia, this is further amplified by collective war experiences. This paper investigates the association between identity-based variables, related to ethnification and war experiences, and anti-immigrant prejudice in Croatia. The study employed structural equation modelling of the data from a large youth sample (N = 1,034). Higher ethnic threat, lower cultural capital, more exclusive conception of nationhood and right-wing political orientation predicted stronger anti-immigrant prejudice. Ethnic threat moderated the effect of political orientation on prejudice: under high ethnic threat there was no difference between left-wing and right-wing individuals. As the results correspond to findings from Western countries, we argue that comparable explanations of anti-immigrant prejudice may be applied to non-Western and Western contexts.
... Other long-term socialisation factors take into account the inter-and multi-cultural nature of the country and its history, which result in cultural traditions that may be more or less predisposed to sympathy for migration (Bello, 2017;García-Faroldi 2017). In particular, individuals in those countries that have built a national identity around the nation as an ethnic group are less likely to be supportive of immigration than individuals in which nationalism has a more institutional or civic character (Levanon and Lewin-Epstein 2010), particularly in those countries with a history of war (Hiers, Soehl and Wimmer 2017 Other scholars have looked at more obtuse societal factors to argue that whites are socialised in the United States into latent racist attitudes which can be activated by political symbols (Berg 2013;Huddy and Sears 1995;Sears et al. 1997;Tarman and Sears 2005). These subtly racist views manifest in support for tradition, exaggerated perceptions of difference and weaker empathy for non-whites and thus lead to anti-immigration attitudes (Pettigrew and Meertens 1995). ...
The International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) commissioned the Migration Policy Centre (MPC) of the European University Institute to provide this report in early 2018, based on the work of the MPC’s Observatory of Public Attitudes to Migration (OPAM). This built on the insight and recommendations of the first EuroMed Migration Communications Study—‘How does the media on both sides of the Mediterranean report on migration?' This second study aims to:
• Offer a better understanding of public attitudes to migration in 17 selected countries on both sides of the Mediterranean;
• Attempt to explain why attitudes to migration are what they are — with an emphasis on
the role of media. The report both summarises previous findings and provides new analyses;
• Provide recommendations on how to communicate on migration in a non-polarising manner.
... Um zusätzlich zu überprüfen, ob nicht die absoluten Größen der strukturellen Makrovariablen (Ausmaß der Arbeitslosigkeit, Anzahl der Asylanträge) einen Einfluss auf die individuelle Einstellung haben, sondern die Veränderung dieser Faktoren im Zeitverlauf (vgl. Hiers et al. 2017;Kehrberg 2007), haben wir die gleichen Analysen mit der Veränderung der Arbeitslosigkeitsquote zwischen 2008 und 2015 und der Veränderung der Asylantragszahlen zwischen 2011 und 2015 durchgeführt. Die Ergebnisse unterscheiden sich nicht von den hier präsentierten Ergebnissen. ...
How can one increase openness towards conflict refugees in states that have experienced conflict? While highlighting shared war experience may reduce hostility toward refugees by enabling people to better understand the plight of refugees, it may also foment higher levels of out-group antipathy due to heightened feelings of threat. To answer this question, we leverage the context of South Korea, a country that technically remains at war with North Korea for more than 70 years and yet attracts asylum seekers as an advanced economy. This provides a hard case to shift residents' refugee acceptance, as challenges associated with accepting refugees are amplified with ongoing threat concerns. Employing an original survey, we find that when the parallels between the human costs of the Korean War and current conflicts are underscored, refugee acceptance increases, particularly among those whose families were displaced by the war. Moreover, this strategy is more effective than perspective-taking exercises.
There are considerable contextual differences, both between countries and municipalities, in the degree to which first- and second-generation immigrants are involved in crime. This study aims to understand such variation better, focusing on the local level. It examines whether municipal variation in self-reported crimes among Turkish- and Moroccan-Dutch men residing in 30 representative Dutch cities ( n = 902), including the four largest cities, is associated with municipal variation in multicultural attitudes, or ‘community multiculturalism’ (CM), among the native-Dutch living in these municipalities ( n = 2556). We propose and test a mechanism-based theoretical model that links Berry's acculturation theory to general strain theory, social bonding theory, and collective efficacy theory. In line with a previous study using police data, the self-reported offending incidence is indeed considerably lower in municipalities with higher CM levels than in other, demographically comparable municipalities. The empirical evidence suggests that the association between CM and immigrant crime is caused by CM promoting social control in the immigrant group, both at the individual and community levels.
International law obliges states to admit refugees while allowing discretion in accepting voluntary immigrants. This study, based on a 26-country survey, examines citizen attitudes towards these groups. With reference to the debate in political philosophy, the authors distinguish between different attitudinal groups: Nationalists, who advocate for border control; Cosmopolitans, who support unrestricted immigration rights; Legalists, who align with international law by supporting state discretion for voluntary immigrants but mandating refugee acceptance; and Inconsistents, who believe the state should have the right to reject refugees but not voluntary immigrants. The findings reveal that most citizens do not differentiate between refugees and voluntary immigrants, challenging the legal distinction in international law. Nationalists make up 44% of respondents, Cosmopolitans 31%, Legalists 15%, and Inconsistents 9%. Nationalists and Cosmopolitans have clear social profiles based on structural and cultural characteristics, while Legalists and Inconsistents do not.
According to critics of globalization, it has ushered in a new era of economic inequality, with some of the biggest “losers” being the majority working classes in advanced capitalist democracies. Economically aggrieved, culturally threatened, and politically excluded, they have become the bedrock of right-wing political parties in much of Europe and the United States. Integral to this phenomenon is the heightened anti-immigrant prejudice espoused by both supporters and leaders of populist movements. The present study investigates a critical issue in this context, one that has been implicitly assumed but relatively understudied: the impact of globalization on xenophobic attitudes among natives. It also examines whether and to what extent globalization moderates the effect of ethnic nationalism on their preferences for restrictive immigration and immigrant assimilation. Findings from multilevel analysis indicate that globalization, as well as the nativist backlash, plays a significant role in directly and indirectly shaping how immigration and immigrants are perceived in host societies.
Wars can produce drastic changes in the attitudes and behavior of the citizens of the countries involved in the fighting. Yet such conflicts also have important security and economic implications for uninvolved, ‘third-party‘ states. How do the wars of others shape domestic public attitudes? We explore this question by analyzing the effect of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine on Spanish nationalism. Exploiting a natural experiment in Spain, we show that the Russian invasion caused a general increase in the salience of Spanish national identification, but not at the expense of regional or substate national identities. We also find an activation effect on electoral participation and increased support for taxation. Our study illuminates pathways through which international conflicts can impact domestic politics in third-party states.
The literature has established that threat to freedom activates psychological reactance in people, and yet, there is scant evidence about the association between threat of citizenship values and psychological reactance. The current study aimed to examine the association between awareness of citizenship values threats and psychological reactance, and to investigate the mediation role of intellectual security in this relationship. A sample of 416 students (71.6% of which were fernales mean age = 25.3; SD = 7.11; range = 18-42) was recruited in this study. They completed the Psychological Reactance Scale, the Intellectual Security Scale and the Awareness of Threats of Citizenship Values Questionnaire as well as a set of demographic questions. To answer the main question, a path analysis was conducted using structural equation models. Findings showed that the threat of citizenship values was positively related to psychological reactance, and intellectual security negatively mediated this relationship. Conclusion: it seems that intellectual security plays an important role in mitigating the negative thoughts that people might have when they are threatened. Recommendations: Given the importance of instilling intellectual security in young people, it is recommended to educational institutions and counselors to make it apriority in their programs so that the youth grow up with cognitive tools that allow them to stay away from deviant behaviors when faced with threat.
Recent public and scholarly discourse suggests that partisanship informs how people feel about social groups in the United States by organizing those groups into camps of political friends and enemies. More generally, this implies that Americans’ attitudes toward social groups exhibit interdependence, a heretofore underexplored proposition. We develop a conceptual and methodological approach to investigating such interdependence and apply it to attitudes toward 17 social groups, the broadest set of measures available to date. We identify three subpopulations with distinct attitude logics: partisans, who feel warm toward groups commonly associated with their political party and cool toward those linked to the out-party; racials, distinguished by their consistently warmer or cooler feelings toward all racial groups relative to other forms of social group membership; and neutrals, who generally evaluate social groups neither warmly nor coolly. Individuals’ social positions and experiences, particularly the strength of their partisanship, their race, and their experience of racial discrimination, inform how they construe the social space. These findings shed light on contemporary political and social divisions while expanding the toolkit available for the study of attitudes toward social groups.
Anti-immigrant sentiments are rising across the globe, influencing electoral results, economic policies, labour market outcomes, and even businesses. The factors influencing such sentiments range from socio-economic to cultural. In this paper, I study the impact of one such random shock – terrorism, on anti-immigrant attitudes. I utilise the variation in time and location of terrorist attacks to identify their effect. For this, I analyse the opinions of more than 250,000 individuals belonging to 32 European countries over the period 2002 to 2019. I find that there is around 4 percent decrease on average in an individual's pro-immigrant attitudes after foreigners have carried out terrorist attacks in their country. But this detrimental effect disappears after 6 months and is more localised. My findings imply that inspite of being a relatively rare experience, exposure to terrorism can briefly prejudice an individual against immigrants, but only when the perpetrator(s) is of a different nationality. This can be helpful in understanding the factors leading to increased animosity against migrants.
The Gallup World Poll was used to develop a global index of anti-immigrant xenophobia. The data were collected in 151 countries between 2016 and 2020. Results suggest that xenophobia has stronger associations with cultural variables (e.g., power distance and allocentrism) and well-being variables (e.g., eudaimonic well-being and positive affect) than with economic and social indicators (e.g., national wealth, perceived injustice, and good governance). Globalization is not significantly correlated with xenophobia. Results indicate that this new global index is a valid measure that provides an up-to-date assessment of national xenophobia with much broader coverage than previous indices.
Identifying and describing attitudes to immigration , let alone explaining them and their effects, is not a simple matter. In this chapter, we first outline the major scholarly works explaining attitudes to immigration. We identify six broad theoretical categories: economic interests, socialisation, psychological explanations, cueing, contact and context, and finally 'attitudinal embeddedness'. For each of these we present the key findings and consider the strengths and shortcomings of the literature, where applicable. We also sketch out existing research on the politics of immigration and the effects of attitudes to immigration on democratic politics, which we categorise as research on policy responsiveness, effects on party family support (notably the radical right), party competition, and polarisation. We end by considering future avenues for research.
Bricolage is commonly recognized as a practice of non-traditional resource mobilization by immigrant entrepreneurs within their country of residence. When the host country is in an adversarial social and institutional context characterized by the liability of foreignness, we posit that accessing “resources at hand” in the external environment is hampered by anti-immigrant sentiments, both socially and institutionally. Through a rigorous analysis of eight cases of immigrant entrepreneurs and their South African-based enterprises, we apply Bourdieu’s theory of practice to examine the practice of bricolage at a more nuanced level. Our findings suggest that the localized prejudice against immigrants ‘otherizes’ their foreignness, and in turn, heightens the entrepreneurs’ awareness of their habitus. We argue that the immigrants’ ‘heightened habitus’ represents an internalization of both cognitive (i.e. resources at head) and adaptive (i.e. resources at heart) dispositions informed by the home country, and which serve as crucial endogenous resources by which to reimagine and reconstruct external resources accessed via local social capital. We present the novel theoretical contribution of immigrant entrepreneurial bricolage as the utilization of both endogenous resources at head and heart, which are activated by – and intended to overcome – their liability of foreignness. Our contribution also aims to reconstruct the frequently referenced exogenous resources at hand.
Whether labor market competition is shaping anti-immigration attitudes is a contentious issue. We conduct a novel test of ethnic competition theory by comparing the attitudes toward immigration of workers with fixed-term contracts to those with permanent jobs in Europe. Fixed-term contract workers are particularly at risk of competition as they have to compete for jobs in the foreseeable future. In the first step of our investigation, we analyze cross-sectional data (European Social Survey, 2002–18) from 18 Western European countries. We find that—contrary to our expectation—fixed-term workers are less anti-immigration. The effect is substantively small. In the second step, we use a fixed-effects design with longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP, 1999–2015) to rule out time-constant unobserved heterogeneity. We find that transitioning from a fixed to a permanent contract does not affect anti-immigration attitudes. Our combined results thus add to the growing body of studies that do not find evidence for labor market competition as an explanation of anti-immigrant attitudes.
This study seeks to understand how national chauvinism and cultural patriotism are related to xenophobic attitudes toward immigrants. It does this by examining the extent to which historical legacy, in terms of geopolitical threats and national identity, moderates this relationship. A multilevel analysis across 24 European countries combines measures of national chauvinism, cultural patriotism, and xenophobic attitudes at the individual level with historical data, the geopolitical threat scale, and the national identity longevity index at the country level. Findings demonstrate that, according to these measures, historical legacies of threats and conflicts do not have an interaction effect, but the longevity of national identity moderates the relationship between national chauvinism/cultural patriotism and xenophobic attitudes. That is, in countries with greater national identity longevity, the positive relations between national chauvinism and xenophobic attitudes are weaker, but the negative relations between cultural patriotism and xenophobic attitudes are stronger. These findings contribute to the understanding of national identity by suggesting how it is related to a nation’s historical legacy.
War commemoration either solidifies or undermines the nation. Studying the evolution of Belgian nationalism during and between the two World Wars, the authors argue that the impact of war commemoration on nationalism is conditional on the military networks in which warfare was embedded. The authors rely on commemorative books and archival records to create a unique database of World War I military networks and commemoration as well as nationalist resistance and anti-nationalist collaboration during World War II. Aligned with the main hypothesis, autoregressive network models reveal that if military networks crosscut the regional communities and fostered equal relationships, commemoration was likely to strengthen the defense of the nation. In the absence of these relationships, however, commemoration activated internal fault lines that undermined nationalism. These findings highlight how collective rituals, military organization, and social structure should be studied simultaneously to fully understand the relational dynamics of warfare and nation. This article also calls attention to a distinct set of mechanisms through which organizational and ideational effects produced by one war can carry on to the next.
How do perceived threats influence politicians’ attitudes towards religious minorities? Examining the Turkish parliamentary records between 1946 and 1960, this study suggests that perceived security threats significantly contribute to Turkish political parties’ negative descriptions of Armenians. The research analyzes speeches about Armenians via a mixed-method content analysis. The findings demonstrate that (a) debate about security threats is a reliable predictor of the political parties’ negative portrayals, and (b) members of the parliament justify their negative views by labeling Armenians as an enemy. The article concludes that perceived threats evoke negative speeches about Armenians in Turkish politics.
Research analyzing attitudes toward immigrants in Europe studies how the immigrant population size in a country conditions prejudicial attitudes against immigrants. While research on immigrant group size in countries is important, research considering the size of immigrant groups at other geographic scales, such as cities, is relatively unexplored. Using data on nearly 30,000 residents of 63 European cities from the Flash Eurobarometer 366 survey, we ask: how does the immigrant population size in a country and a city relate to how Europeans consider immigrants in their city? Findings show support for a group threat framework in that greater immigrant group size is linked to more anti-immigrant views, but this finding holds only for cities, not for countries. Our discussion centers on the ways in which cities may be linked to this threat, and how a multi-scalar conception of group threat can uncover varying relationships for immigration attitudes.
Political sociology is a large and expanding field, and The New Handbook of Political Sociology supplies the knowledge necessary to keep up with the newest developments. Written by a distinguished group of leading scholars in sociology, this volume provides a critical survey of the state of the art and points the way to new directions in future research. The New Handbook presents the field in six parts: theories of political sociology, the information and knowledge explosion, the state and political parties, civil society and citizenship, public policy, and globalization and empire. Covering all subareas of the field with both theory and empirics, it directly connects scholars with the cutting edge. A total reconceptualization of the first edition, the New Handbook features nine additional chapters and highlights the role of race, gender, colonialism, and knowledge production.
Threat relates to right‐wing ideological attitudes at the individual level. The present study aims to extend this relationship to the national level. More specifically, in a sample of 91 nations, we collected country‐level indicators of threat (including inflation, unemployment, gross national product, homicide rate, and life expectancy). Moreover, we analyzed data from the European and World Value Survey (total N = 134,516) to obtain aggregated country‐level indicators for social‐cultural and economic‐hierarchical right‐wing attitudes for each of these countries. In accordance with previous findings based on the individual level, a positive relationship between threat indicators and right‐wing attitudes emerged. This relationship was stronger than what was usually reported at the individual level. In the discussion, we focus on the mutually reinforcing influence at the individual and national levels in terms of right‐wing attitudes.
European societies have been experiencing increasing rates of immigration in recent decades. At the same time one can observe a substantial rise in anti-foreigner sentiments. In this study we investigate the effect of human values on attitudes towards immigration. We hypothesise that self-transcendent individuals are more supportive of, and conservative individuals are more adverse to, immigration. We do not expect large differences in the effect of values across contexts. To explain cross-country and cross-time differences we use group threat theory, according to which larger inflows of immigration combined with challenging economic conditions impose a threat on the host society, resulting in more negative attitudes towards immigration. To test our hypotheses we use data from the first three rounds of the European Social Survey (2002–03, 2004–05 and 2006–07) and multilevel analysis. Prior to the interpretation of the results, we guarantee that the concepts display measurement invariance across countries and over time. Our results largely confirm our hypotheses regarding the role that values play in the explanation of anti-immigration attitudes.
This article examines how political factors influence anti-immigrant attitudes by focusing on political articulation performed by political parties active at the national level in 26 European countries. Multi-level analysis reveals a significant positive association between general party articulation and anti-immigrant attitudes. In particular, it seems to be when traditional right- or left-wing parties articulate that attitudes towards immigrants turn increasingly negative. Left-leaning individuals are particularly influenced when parties belonging to the political left raise these issues, which indicates that the ideological position of the individual functions as a mediating factor in this regard. The results contribute to a broader understanding of the role of political factors and underscore the importance of their inclusion in cross-national studies of anti-immigrant attitudes.
This study investigates the impact of the latest wave of globalization on anti-immigrant prejudice. We discern and test two contradictory accounts of the impact of globalization on anti-immigrant prejudice from the prejudice and globalization literatures. On the one hand, there is the ‘civilizing/integrative globalization’ thesis, which implies that globalization should help to decrease prejudice by creating sustained and equal contact between previously alien cultures and peoples, and by spreading economic gains to everybody. On the other hand, there is the ‘destructive globalization/globalization as a threat’ thesis, which argues that globalization should increase anti-immigrant prejudice by intensifying competition over resources and by increasing perceived threat by native populations as a result of increasing immigrant populations. We test these two accounts using a multi-level analysis of 64 countries and nearly 150,000 individuals, derived from the World Values Surveys (waves 3–5). Our analyses reveal support for ‘destructive globalization/ globalization as a threat’ thesis, but emphasize the multi-dimensional character of globalization. We find that citizens of countries with higher levels of trade openness have significantly more anti-immigrant sentiments. There is also some evidence that in countries where unemployment is accompanied by high levels of trade openness or the existence of large immigrant populations, citizens hold high anti-immigrant prejudice. By contrast, foreign direct investment (FDI) has a weak effect.
The study examines change over time in sentiments toward out-group populations in European societies. For this purpose data were compiled from four waves of the Eurobarometer surveys for 12 countries that provided detailed and comparable information on attitudes toward foreigners between 1988 and 2000. A series of multilevel hierarchical linear models were estimated to examine change in the effects of individual- and country-level sources of threat on anti-foreigner sentiment. The analysis shows a substantial rise in anti-foreigner sentiment between 1988 and 2000 in all 12 countries. The rise in anti-foreigner sentiment was steep in the early period (between 1988 and 1994), then leveled off after that. Although anti-foreigner sentiment tends to be more pronounced in places with a large proportion of foreign populations and where economic conditions are less prosperous, the effects of both factors on anti-foreigner sentiment have not changed over time. The analysis also shows that anti-foreigner sentiment is more pronounced in places with greater support for right-wing extreme parties. The impact of individual-level socioeconomic characteristics such as education has remained stable over the years, but the effect of political ideology has increased. The meaning and significance of the findings are discussed within the context of European societies.
This article scrutinizes the theoretically proposed positive sides of different forms of civic national attachment. Data come from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 1995, which is a programme for cross-country comparative attitude studies. Two different forms of attachment and their relationships to xenophobia have been examined, namely national identity and national pride. In order to dismiss possible country-specific phenomena, four Western countries, Australia, Germany, Britain and Sweden were studied. The choice of countries was based on the different policy regimes implemented in the areas of citizenship and immigration, which illustrate how the nation-state is conceptualized in the different countries. The results show that both civic national identity and national pride go together with xenophobia, whereas the reverse holds for ethnic national identity and national pride in all four countries, despite their different conceptualizations of the nation-state. In all, the article gives empirical support for the proposed theoretical argument of a separation of the civic and ethnic in society.
We set out to answer three questions: (a) to what extent do (former) EU candidate countries differ from Western European countries regarding opposition to civil rights for legal migrants? (b) to what extent do the (former) EU candidate countries differ among themselves in terms of this particular anti-immigrant sentiment, that is, opposition to civil rights for legal migrants? and (c) to what extent can we explain such cross-national differences, considering cross-national demographic or economic conditions, taking into account individual differences? We found that former EU candidate countries were really on comparable levels as EU member states in terms of opposition to civil rights for legal migrants. We found rather strong differences with countries like Estonia, Latvia and Hungary standing out, whereas countries like Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Turkey showed low levels. We found that these differences were (rather strongly) explained by the migrant stock in the country. Although none of the other national characteristics turned out to reach significance, their parameters were in the direction we proposed.
Drawing on social psychological threat theories and extending them to a national level, this study investigated individual- and country-level predictors of Europeans' support for immigration criteria. Endorsement of ascribed and acquired immigration standards was analysed with survey data across 20 nations. Multi-level regression analyses revealed that among the individual-level predictors, perceived threat had the strongest relationship with support for both entry criteria. Low gross domestic product (GDP) and low refugee rate predicted approval of ascribed criteria. Cross-level interactions revealed that relationships between perceived threat and approval of acquired entry criteria were intensified in high GDP and high refugee rate contexts. The results corroborate predictions of social psychological threat theories and underscore the importance of including macro-social factors in the cross-national study of immigration attitudes.
This article critically reviews the intersectional locus of public opinion scholarship and immigration studies that make use of data from multinational survey projects. Specifically, it emphasizes current cross-national research seeking to understand the causes, manifestations, and implications of attitudes toward immigrants and immigration in economically advanced countries of the world. Despite rapid expansion, the field suffers from several methodological challenges and theoretical constraints. A succinct exposure of trends and patterns is followed by presentations of influential theoretical perspectives and established individual- and contextual-level determinants. The review suggests that strengthening the conceptual apparatus and enlarging the analytical focus are priorities. It concludes with some observations on how to circumvent these problems and to bridge current research with future explorations of the embedded nature of such public attitudes.
In this article, we estimate and compare the effects of two value dimensions taken from the theory of basic human values—namely, self-transcendence and conservation—on attitudes toward immigration in 19 countries. Data from the first wave (2002–03) of the European Social Survey (ESS) is utilized for the analyses. This cross-national survey measures basic human values with a new 21-item instrument. Attitudes toward immigration are operationalized using two dimensions: willingness to allow immigrants into the country and rejection of conditions to allow them. Effects of the value dimensions on immigration attitudes are compared across 19 nations using multiple-group multiple-indicators structural equation modelling (MGSEM). We hypothesize that these effects are equal across countries. The critical statistical legitimacy for comparing these effects across countries is discussed in detail, and partial measurement invariance is evidenced. The MGSEM provides strong support for our hypotheses in 17 countries: self-transcendence displays a positive effect on support for immigration, and conservation a negative effect. This result is robust also after accounting for several individual and contextual variables. Effects are found to differ a little across countries. It is shown that clusters of countries with equal effect sizes can be distinguished, and possible explanations for effect size differences are discussed.
This article assesses the influence of material interests and cultural identities on European opinion about immigration. Analysis of respondents in twenty countries sampled in the 2002-03 European Social Survey demonstrates that they are unenthusiastic about high levels of immigration and typically overestimate the actual number of immigrants living in their country. At the individual level, cultural and national identity, economic interests and the level of information about immigration are all important predictors of attitudes. 'Symbolic' predispositions, such as preferences for cultural unity, have a stronger statistical effect than economic dissatisfaction. Variation across countries in both the level and the predictors of opposition to immigration are mostly unrelated to contextual factors cited in previous research, notably the amount of immigration into a country and the overall state of its economy. The ramifications of these findings for policy makers are discussed in the context of current debates about immigration and European integration.
In this paper we focus on opposition among European citizens to the granting of civil rights to legal migrants, a phenomenon considered to be a crucial aspect of ethnic exclusionism. We set out to establish to what extent differences in support of ethnic exclusionism can be explained in terms of effects of particular (a) individual and (b) contextual characteristics, and in terms of (c) interactions between contextual and individual characteristics. We have systematically derived hypotheses from Ethnic Competition Theory. We used cross-national comparable data from 15 European countries and performed multi-level analyses (total N = 12,728). We found that people living in individual competitive conditions perceive ethnic out-groups as a threat, and that this in turn reinforces ethnic exclusionism. Contextual competitive conditions, particularly the presence of non-EU citizens, also affect ethnic exclusionism.
The Scandinavian countries today form a security-community for economic cooperation and the settlement of international controversy by peaceful methods rather than by war. This status was achieved not while Norway and Sweden were amalgamated in a political union from 1814 to 1905, but only after separation. In this book Dr. Lindgren analyzes some of the forces underlying the failure and dissolution of the Norway-Sweden union.
As the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1992, Czechoslovakia, the only genuine democracy in post-World War I Central-Eastern Europe, broke up into two independent successor states. This book explores the failed search for a postcommunist constitution and it records in a lively style a singular instance of the peaceful settlement of an ethnic dispute. For more than three years after the implosion of the Communist regime in 1989, the Czechs and Slovaks negotiated the terms of a new relationship to succeed the centralized federation created under communism. After failing to agree to the terms of a new union, the parties agreed on an orderly breakup. In the background of the narrative loom general issues such as: What are the sources of ethnic conflict and what is the impact of nationalism? Why do ethnic groups choose secession and what makes for peaceful rather than violent separation? What factors influence the course of postcommunist constitutional negotiations, which are inevitably conducted in the context of institutional and societal transformation? The author explores these issues and the reasons for the breakup.
The existing quantitative literature on war takes the independent nation-state as the self-evident unit of analysis and largely excludes other political types from consideration. In contrast, the authors argue that the change in the institutional form of states is itself a major cause for war. The rise of empires and the global spread of the nation-state are the most important institutional transformations in the modern age. To test this hypothesis, the authors introduce a new data set that records the outbreak of war in fixed geographic territories from 1816 to 2001, independent of the political entity in control of a territory. Analysis of this data set demonstrates that wars are much more likely during and because of these two transformations. For the transformation to the modern nation-state, the authors confirm this hypothesis further with logit regressions that control for variables that have been robustly significant in previous research. The results provide support for the main mechanisms that explain this time dependency. Modern nation-states are ruled in the name of a nationally defined people, in contrast to empires, which govern to spread a faith across the world, to bring civilization to backward people, or to advance the world revolutionary cause. The institution of the nation-state thus introduces incentives for political elites to privilege members of the national majority over ethnic minorities, and for minority elites to mobilize against such political discrimination. The resulting power struggles over the ethno-national character of the state may escalate into civil wars. Interstate wars can result from attempts to protect co-nationals who are politically excluded in neighboring states. The reported research thus provides a corrective to mainstream approaches, which exclude ethnic and nationalist politics as factors that would help understanding the dynamics of war.
Using a quasi-experimental research design, this study examines the effect of terrorist events on the perception of immigrants across 65 regions in nine European countries. It first elaborates a theoretical argument that explains the effect of events and points to economic conditions, the size of the immigrant population, and personal contact as mediating factors. This argument is evaluated using the fact that the terror attack in Bali on October 12, 2002, occurred during the fieldwork period of the European Social Survey. The findings from this natural experiment reveal considerable cross-national and regional variation in the effect of the event and its temporal duration. The analysis on the regional level supports the argument about contextual variations in the response to the event and a second analysis based on the 2004 Madrid bombing confirms the study’s conclusions. Implications of the findings for societal responses to terror attacks, the literature on attitudes toward immigrants, and survey research are discussed.
The relationship between globalisation and national identity is puzzling. While some observers have found that globalisation reduces people's identification with their nation, others have reached the opposite conclusion. This article explores this conundrum by examining the relationship between globalisation and people's feelings towards national identity. Using data from the International Social Survey Program National Identity II () and the World Values Survey (), it analyses these relations across sixty-three countries. Employing a multilevel approach, it investigates how a country's level of globalisation is related to its public perceptions towards different dimensions of national identity. The results suggest that a country's level of globalisation is not related to national identification or nationalism but it is related negatively to patriotism, the willingness to fight for the country and ethnic conceptions of membership in the nation. An examination of alternative explanations indicates that globalisation has a distinct impact on national identity.
In this study, we examined the relationship between national identification and anti-immigrant prejudice in a multilevel analysis of ISSP survey data from 37,030 individuals in 31 countries. We argue that this relationship depends on how national groups are defined by their members. Across the 31 national samples, the correlation between national identification and prejudice ranged from weakly negative (-.06) to moderately positive (.37). The relationship was significantly stronger in countries where people on average endorsed a definition of national belonging based on language, and weaker where people on average defined the nation in terms of citizenship. These effects occurred at a national rather than individual level, supporting an explanation in terms of the construction of nationality that prevails in a given context. Endorsement of the ancestry-based criteria for nationality was positively associated with prejudice, but only at the individual level.
This paper underlines the importance of the distinction between `social' and `system' integration (agency and structure) introduced by David Lockwood in 1964. Its four sections (i) examine the original difficulty of maintaining any distinction between the `parts' of society and its `people' against the social ontology of Individualism whose proponents argued that the former must always be reduced to the latter as individuals were the ultimate constituents of society, (ii) shows how collectivist opposition held `systemic factors' to be indispensable in sociological explanations, but could not substantiate their ontological status against the charge of reification whilst empiricism held sway, (iii) explores how once the individualist/collectivist debate was superseded, Lockwood's distinction was redefined in structuration theory, where insistence on treating structure and agency as mutually constitutive effectively denied their independent variation and thus reduced the `social' and the `systemic' to differences in the scale of social practices; (iv) argues that social realism's ontology, in which `structures' and `agents' belong to different emergent strata of social reality, avoids reducing one to the other or eliding the two. Instead it supplies the ontological grounding for Lockwood's distinction and enables it to be developed into an explanatory programme - analytical dualism - whose central tenet is the need to explore the interplay between these two irreducible constituents of social reality in order to account for why things are `so and not otherwise' and in a manner which is of direct utility to practical analysts of society.
This paper addresses two major limitations of cross-national research on electoral support for extreme right parties (ERPs) in western Europe: its almost exclusive focus on national-level data and its failure to examine the role of the social welfare state and social capital. We employ Tobit I estimations in an additive and interactive model and compute conditional coefficients and standard errors for several interactive variables. We conclude that levels of social capital play a major role in mediating the relationships between immigration, unemployment and support for ERPs.
In this paper a set of hypotheses about the conditions under which territorial disputes evolve into enduring rivalries are tested against a dataset of 129 territorial disputes in the international system from 1950-1990. During this period only 36 territorial disputes developed into enduring rivalries. The central theoretical question I address is what conditions cause foreign policy leaders to adopt non-violent and more flexible diplomatic policies over disputed territory and, conversely, when will leaders pursue territorial claims in a more aggressive and confrontational manner? To answer this question I utilize a modified realist approach which posits that foreign policy choices are shaped by the domestic political goal of state leaders to retain their position of political power. From this theoretical approach a series of hypotheses focusing on the issues at stake in control of disputed territory, the domestic political context, and the international political-military environment of challenger states are formulated. Empirical results, based on statistical tests, are then presented and provide considerable evidence of the interplay of domestic and international level variables in the decisions of state leaders whether to pursue territorial goals by means of diplomatic and military pressure over an extended period of time.
Four explanations of xenophobia and racism will be reviewed by confronting them with the results of empirical studies. I try to show that xenophobic and racist views of the social world are not instrumental to a fight for scarce jobs or housing. Neither is it appropriate to interpret them as a result of a culture clash that is caused by migratory movements across countries and continents. They are not mere radicalizations of the discourse of exclusion and devaluation which political and administrative elites generate and institutionalize, for example, in immigration policies. Starting from the insights of this critical review, I shall develop the hypothesis that xenophobia and racism should be seen as appeals to the pact of solidarity into which state and society have entered in modern nation‐states and which in times of intensified social conflicts seems fragile in the eyes of downwardly mobile groups. The xenophobic discourse serves not only to reassure identity when nationalistic self‐images run into crisis but is an element of a political struggle about who has the right to be cared for by the state and society: a fight for the collective goods of the modern state.
This article examines national identification from a comparative and multilevel perspective. Building on the identity, nationalism, and prejudice literatures, I analyze relationships between societies' economic, political, and cultural characteristics (e.g., development, globalization, democratic governance, militarism, and religious and linguistic diversity), individual characteristics (e.g., socioeconomic status and minority status), and preferences for the content of national identities. I also examine relationships between national identity content and public policy preferences toward immigration, citizenship, assimilation, and foreign policy, generally. I use confirmatory factor analysis and multilevel modeling to analyze country-level data and survey data from 31 countries (from the International Social Survey Program's 2003 National Identity II Module). Results suggest that individual and country characteristics help account for the variable and contested nature of national identification. Moreover, the content of national identity categories has implications for public policy and intergroup relations.
This article explores the role of others in the (re-)definition of national identity. A brief review of dominant theories of nationalism shows that the existence of the 'other' is an implicit assumption made by most scholars. Nevertheless, the relationship between the nation and the other remains largely unexplored. However, national identity is defined not only from within, namely from the features that fellow-nationals share in common but also from without, that is, through distinguishing and differentiating the nation from other nations or ethnic groups. National identity becomes meaningful only through the contrast with others. This article introduces the notion of 'significant others' to investigate the ways in which others may condition the formation or lead to a transformation of the identity of the ingroup. The Macedonian question and the emergence of a new Greek nationalism is used as a case-study to highlight the role of significant others in shaping the identity of the nation.
Proceeding from mass society theory and the theory of social capital, this article discusses the effect of social isolation, social trust, and membership in voluntary organizations on radical right-wing voting in Belgium, Denmark, France, Norway, and Switzerland. By using data from the first and third rounds of the European Social Survey, a number of logistic regression models are estimated. The results indicate that social isolation and social capital, measured as active membership in voluntary organizations, are of marginal value for explaining radical right-wing voting, although there is some cross-national variation. Moreover, the results show that not even members of humanitarian aid and human rights organizations are less likely to vote for the radical right, which clearly questions the universalistic ambitions of Putnam's theory of social capital and its core idea that organizational membership fosters tolerance and civic virtues.
Past research has emphasized two critical economic concerns that appear to generate anti-immigrant sentiment among native citizens: concerns about labor market competition and concerns about the fiscal burden on public services. We provide direct tests of both models of attitude formation using an original survey experiment embedded in a nationwide U.S. survey. The labor market competition model predicts that natives will be most opposed to immigrants who have similar skill levels to their own. We find instead that both low skilled and highly skilled natives strongly prefer highly skilled immigrants over low skilled immigrants, and this preference is not decreasing in natives' skill levels. The fiscal burden model anticipates that rich natives oppose low skilled immigration more than poor natives, and that this gap is larger in states with greater fiscal exposure (in terms of immigrant access to public services). We find instead that rich and poor natives are equally opposed to low skilled immigration, and rich natives are actually less opposed to low skilled immigration in states with more fiscal exposure than they are elsewhere. We do find that poor natives are more opposed to low skilled immigration in states with greater fiscal exposure than elsewhere, suggesting that concerns about access to or overcrowding of public services contributes to anti-immigrant attitudes.
In this introduction to the special issue on the geopolitics of migration, I discuss some of the problematic elements of current approaches to migration studies. In particular, I comment on the concept of ‘transnationalism’ as it has been applied to immigrant communities, and argue that claims about immigrant transnationalism resemble contemporary and historical polemics on the non-assimilation of immigrants. I propose that our understanding of the dynamics of immigrant-host society relationships must begin with an understanding of the geopolitical contexts in which migration takes place. I illustrate my argument using the case of Arab Americans in the aftermath of September 11, and I conclude by urging a reconsideration of the concept of assimilation as a ‘politics of sameness’.
Anti-immigration attitudes and its origins have been investigated quite extensively. Research that focuses on the evolution of attitudes toward immigration, however, is far more scarce. In this paper, we use data from the first three rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS) to study the trend of anti-immigration attitudes between 2002 and 2007 in 17 European countries. In the first part of the paper, we discuss the critical legitimacy for comparing latent variable means over countries and time. A Multiple-Group Multiple Indicator Structural Equation Modeling (MGSEM) approach is used to test the cross-country and cross-time equivalence of the variables under study. In a second step, we try to offer an explanation for the observed trends using a dynamic version of group conflict theory. The country-specific evolutions in attitudes toward immigration are shown to coincide with national context factors, such as immigration flows and changes in unemployment rates.
The study develops an index of globalization covering its three main dimensions: economic integration, social integration, and political integration. Using panel data for 123 countries in 1970-2000 it is analysed empirically whether the overall index of globalization as well as sub-indexes constructed to measure the single dimensions affect economic growth. As the results show, globalization indeed promotes growth. The dimensions most robustly related with growth refer to actual economic flows and restrictions in developed countries. Although less robustly, information flows also promote growth whereas political integration has no effect.
This article challenges the conventional dichotomy between the civic-Western and ethnic-Eastern forms of national attachments and empirically explores the link between national feelings and anti-immigrant sentiment, as expressed by European publics. We use data from the 1995 and 2003 ISSP modules to: (1) expose the multidimensional nature of national feelings, and (2) investigate the cross-country variation in mean levels and inter-regional heterogeneity in the severity of effects on anti-immigrant sentiment for four dimensions of national feelings. The results show that there are important regional differences in the mean levels and effects exerted by the civic and ethnic national feelings at both points in time. Overall, these findings point to the limited relevance of the conceptual demarcation between the Western-civic and Eastern-ethnic types, as a trend of cross-regional convergence is rather strongly supported. We discuss the implications of the results within the broader context of post-communist transition and eastward enlargement of the European Union.