Conference Agenda

The proposed presentation aims to discuss attitudes towards immigrants in a European context and analyze drivers of anti-immigrant attitudes such as the feeling of control, basic human values, political orientation and preferences related to right-wing populism. Based on data from the European Social Survey, we first describe how the attitudes of people in Europe changed throughout a period of two decades (between 2002 and 2021). We will show that although attitudes are influenced by a number of demographic and subjective features of individuals, on the macro-level they seem to be surprisingly stable, yet hide significant cross-country differences. Then, we zoom in to the three most significant elements influencing attitudes towards immigrants: the feeling of control, basic human values, and political orientation. Applying a multi-level model we test the validity of three theories about factors informing attitudes towards immigrants—competition theory, locus of control, and the role of basic human values—and include time (pre- and post-2015 refugee-crisis periods) into the analysis. In the discussion we link ESS data to recent research on populism in Europe that categorizes populist parties across the continent and establish that the degree to which anti-migrant feelings are linked to support for political populism varies significantly across European countries. We show that right-wing populist parties gather and feed that part of the population which is very negative towards migrants and migration in general, and this process is also driven by the significance awarded the value of security vis-à-vis humanitarianism. Finally, we will discuss the limitations of measuring attitudes towards immigrants inherent to the mode of the survey by highlighting measurement errors inherent to classical interviewer assisted survey mode (that has been applied by the ESS until 2022) and self-completion mode, which is now the future strategy to the European Social Survey.

We use data from the European Social Survey to identify Portuguese citizens likely to have been conscripted between 1961 and 1974 for military service in the former Portuguese colonies in Africa. The draft is estimated to have enlisted approximately 70 percent of the entire male population within specific age groups, with each man serving between 2 and 4 years. These cohorts, from one of the poorest countries in Western Europe, were catapulted to Africa, to fight against and alongside Africans. We show that men likely to have served in African wars exhibit more favourable attitudes towards immigration compared to women within the same cohort, as well as to males from younger and older cohorts. Contemporaneous cohorts from Spain are employed as placebo tests. Our findings are corroborated in a regression discontinuity design framework.

In this paper, we exploit an historical setting to investigate how extreme situations and early-life collaborative and adversarial contact with people from other ethnicities shapes attitudes towards immigrants. Between 1961 and 1974, approximately 70% of military-age Portuguese men were conscripted annually and deployed to participate in the African Colonial Wars. Referred to as the “conscripted generation”, these men were sent from their lives under a closed European catholic dictatorship to conflict zones in Angola, Mozambique, or Guinea Bissau. For most of them, military deployment was the first time out of their country or even their region of birth – and the first time they were in contact with people from a different ethnicity. Their experiences involved not only fighting against African adversaries, but also alongside them as about half of the Portuguese operational troops were composed of African soldiers.

The ongoing conflicts in Syria and Ukraine have resulted in a continuous influx of refugees seeking sanctuary in European countries. However, the prevailing sentiment in host nations is often characterized by a lack of overwhelmingly positive attitudes towards accepting refugees from other countries. This sentiment may become even more pronounced when the migration is driven by economic motives rather than war-related reasons.

At the same time, we can see a resurgence of authoritarianism in various European states, evident through the electoral success of several right-authoritarian governments across the continent. Given that authoritarianism is recognized as a significant determinant of attitudes toward migrants and refugees, this study aims to examine its impact on accepting refugees from Ukraine and Syria. We conducted a pilot study for the ESS with a sample size of 1,000 respondents in Hungary, Portugal, and the UK. In this study, we not only differentiate between the two countries of origin but also consider the reason for migration, distinguishing between those fleeing conflict and those seeking economic opportunities.

We anticipate that the impact of authoritarianism will be more pronounced when the refugee group is perceived as less desirable (Syrian refugees are more likely to be rejected compared to Ukrainian refugees) and the reason for their displacement is perceived as less justifiable (migration for economic reasons is less accepted than fleeing from armed conflict). This research has implications for understanding the dynamics of refugee integration and the challenges countries face in managing refugee flows in an increasingly complex geopolitical landscape.

Climate change is one of the most fundamental global problems, and some evidence points to humanity being on the verge of a climate crisis. For example, extreme weather events of many kinds abound across the globe. At the same time, climate change also is projected to be a major driving force of future migratory movements, for which both the volume and the reactions of the receiving contexts remain unclear. Migration is a contentious issue per se, and the potentials for climate-related refugee movements are estimated to be in the hundreds of millions. But both aspects are not merely tied together via the potential outcomes of emerging migratory pressures: Both climate change perceptions and climate change denial appear strongly founded in political ideology, as is the issue of migration attitudes. This study addresses the potential links between these types of attitudes by investigating the interrelations between climate change perceptions, political ideology and attitudes towards immigration, with the latter being the focal outcome concept of the analyses. The research questions pursued are:

1) To what extent are migration policy preferences influenced by climate change perceptions?

2) Is the extent of this relationship dependent on a) individual political ideology, b) actual policymaking in the realm of environmental policies, and/or c) the number of occurrences of climate-related catastrophes?

Using data from the eighth round of the European Social Survey, the paper therefore investigates macro-level factors related to climate change which have the potential to moderate the relationship between climate worries and immigration attitudes. Data on climate-related disaster frequency in the six years preceding the data collection are provided by the International Monetary Fund and adjusted for the country’s size (i.e. its area), and the OECD Environmental Policy Stringency Index 2015 serves as a measure of policy activity in that policy area. Foreigner share 2015 and GDP 2015 are also added as control variables at the country level. The modeling strategy is based on cross-sectional multilevel models with random slopes for political ideology, human attribution of climate change, and climate change worries. The preliminary results show that being worried about climate change and being of the conviction that climate change is human-driven are associated with more tolerance towards immigration. However, this mechanism is most pronounced on the political left, whereas the political right strongly opposes immigration largely regardless of their stance on the mentioned climate change issues. On the country level, the results suggest that climate policies and the occurrence (i.e. number) of actual climate-related catastrophes do not play a moderating role in the relationship between climate change perception and attitudes towards immigration. This suggests that individual political ideology is of particular importance for the link between climate change attitudes and immigration attitudes, whereas the country-level realities of climate-related policies and climate change disasters appear too distal – at least in the years 2016-17 – for the majority of respondents. Climate change beliefs seem to act as a politico-ideological force operating independently of the very real consequences climate change is beginning to have.

The relevance of understanding public perceptions of refugees in various countries, particularly in Europe, has surged notably since 2015, and it is expected to persist as a critical global issue. Thus, the ability to gauge attitudes toward refugees uniformly across different nations has become increasingly essential. However, to the best of our knowledge, a systematic cross-national analysis of the comparability of various measures of attitudes toward refugees is missing.

This study addresses this significant gap by providing a cross-cultural comparative analysis of the measurement of attitudes toward refugees across diverse languages and countries. For the analysis, we use data from the first round (2002) of the European Social Survey (ESS). Although these data are relatively old, the measures of attitudes toward refugees included in the survey are detailed. Newer ESS data have included several measures of immigration, but they lack such a detailed scale for refugees. Thus, our findings could provide clues as to which items are particularly suitable for comparing attitudes toward refugees across countries, enabling a nuanced understanding of public opinion on the topic.

Utilizing different approaches to measurement invariance testing, including confirmatory factor analysis and the alignment method, we found that multiple but not all items used in the ESS are highly comparable and may be used to compare attitudes toward refugees in a meaningful way across several European countries. Therefore, we recommend the incorporation of these specific items in future international surveys, like the ESS, to enable a more comprehensive examination of attitudes towards refugees, their causes and consequences.