Value Shift: Immigration Attitudes and the Sociocultural Divide

• In Event: Sociocultural Conflict in a Globalized Era

Abstract

The increasing electoral relevance of nationalist issues, such as immigration and European integration, to European politics has led some scholars to posit a new “transnational cleavage". Has this increased salience of nationalism affected how voters' immigration attitudes relate to their attitudes on traditional sociocultural issues? This paper explores this question through the lens of gender attitudes using an 11-wave panel survey from the Netherlands, spanning 2007--2019, and the 2017 European Values Survey. I find support for my hypothesis that gender and immigration attitudes are only weakly related in younger cohorts, in contrast to older cohorts, where the association is strong and positive. Additionally, I find that gender attitudes change via cohort replacement, as well as overtime within individuals. Immigration attitudes, however, remain remarkably stable over the course of the panel and exhibit limited differences across cohorts. I argue that this is because gender equality is largely uncontested in Western Europe, while immigration and multiculturalism remain highly divisive. These findings have several implications, particularly for our understandings of the current dynamics of political contestation in Europe.

Author

• Caroline Lancaster, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill