Temporal crisis dynamics and perceived immigrant threat in cross-national perspective

• In Event: 2366 - Section on Peace, War, and Social Conflict Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 1. Peace, War, and Social Conflict: Intergroup Dynamics

Abstract

The period after 2007 was marked by widespread economic decline which affected various countries throughout the world. These developments have been accompanied by growing tensions in political and public debates on immigration, as is exemplified by broad successes of populist parties. A particular issue that has been resonating through the public sphere is that of immigration. However, to what extent are public attitudes towards immigrants influenced by economic crisis phenomena? We investigate how vulnerable individuals are to current economic developments and how changes in aggregate attitudes to immigration can be traced back to the development of crises across time and space. Furthermore, we investigate how these relationships differ for different types of immigration attitudes. Finally, we aim to investigate several channels through which objective crises can result in the said attitudinal consequences. Our database comprises all waves of the European Social Survey from 2002 to 2017. The use of a repeated cross-sectional multilevel design allows us to consider individual determinants as well as time-varying country-specific characteristics in the models. Based on the date of the survey interview, we generate indicators of the economic and social situation of the respondents or their home country at the respective survey time in order to assess the current situation of the respondents and their macro-level temporal development. Attitudes towards immigrants are measured with three indicators which query the individual assessment of the positive or negative consequences of migration for each country. These dependent variables are considered individually and compared with each other. Our results suggest that the feelings of different threats indeed follow partly different logics. Especially regarding the contextual factors, the magnitudes of the effects differ between the distinct forms of perceived threat. Furthermore, our study suggests that objective crisis constellations influence anti-immigrant attitudes through individual perceptions of the country’s economic performance.

Authors

• Boris Heizmann, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences

• Nora Huth, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences