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Perceptions of Change, Ethnicity, and Immigration Attitudes in Brexit

Thu, August 31, 12:00 to 1:30pm, Hilton Union Square, Nob Hill 4 & 5

Abstract

Many commentators have described the majority vote against continued British membership in the European Union (EU) as a crystallizing manifestation of populist anger against neoliberalism and globalization. The Brexit vote also connoted, and in some respects explicitly denoted, opposition to the ‘freedom of movement’ principle. It is in this context where attitudes and sentiments towards immigrants and immigration can and ought to be analyzed.
Drawing upon social identity theory (SIT) and social dominance orientation (SDO), prior research has inquired into how, and why, immigrants and immigration are perceived to be threats. SIT informs the relevance of self-conceptualization of group membership and inter-group relations to how members of the public define and view ‘outsiders’ to a given society or polity. SDO indicates that individuals who identify themselves as constituting an ‘in-group’ demonstrate negative attitudes toward individuals and communities considered as belonging to an ‘out-group’. The desire for in-group domination and subordination of other groups provides a strong motivation for such bias, and hardened in-group attitudes are also associated with heightened perceptions that resources are zero-sum in nature. Given that concerns about insufficient resources for key social services such as education and the National Health Service (NHS) overlapped with opposition to immigrants and support for Brexit, SDO and SIT are therefore highly pertinent to a study on Brexit.
Cultural motivations have shown to exert a stronger influence on attitudes toward immigrants and immigration than economic ones; the perception of immigrants as a threat is more likely to be influenced by symbolic (e.g., fear of the loss of cultural dominance and purity) than realistic (e.g., strictly resource-based) factors (Hainmuller & Hopkins, 2014; McLaren & Johnson, 2007). What is relatively under-explored is whether different degrees of optimistic or pessimistic evaluations of change across a host of social, cultural, political, and economic issues meaningfully account for differences in attitudes towards immigrants and immigration, and whether majority group status significantly affects these relationships.
To address these questions, I conducted a series of multivariate regression analyses on the Wave 8 dataset of the British Election Studies (BES) Internet Panel, a survey that took place in the run-up to the EU Referendum. I investigated the effects of the following independent variables - higher loci of control (i.e. individual and societal); more positive perceptions of the state of the economy and key social services; stronger support for active public policies to address socio-economic inequality; and more positive evaluations of progress made with respect to cultural equality for the disadvantaged (e.g., Black Britons, LGBTQ individuals, and women) - on attitudes towards immigrants and immigration. Whether or not an individual can be categorized as belonging to an ethnic majority group or non-majority group was conceptualized as a dichotomous moderator variable.
All predictor variables except one (i.e. perceptions of the economy and social services) significantly affected the outcome variable. Stronger support for active public policies to address socio-economic inequality, higher loci of control, and more positive evaluations of cultural progress significantly predicted more positive attitudes towards immigrants and immigration. Significant moderation was found for the individual and societal locus of control predictors: the effects of higher individual and societal loci of control on attitudes toward immigrants and immigration depend on majority group status. The findings with respect to the effects of individual locus of control offer a particularly useful insight. For the non-majority group, a higher individual locus of control led to more positive attitudes; in contrast, for the majority group higher scores brought about less positive attitudes. These findings lend partial support to the claim that policy contexts ought to enhance both societal and individual locus of control so as to strengthen more positive attitudes towards immigrants and immigration (Harell, Soroka, & Iyengar, 2016). I also suggest that the effects of such interventions and contexts on individual locus of control are likely to be more complicated.

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