Journal
COMPARATIVE EUROPEAN POLITICS
Volume 17, Issue 6, Pages 832-859Publisher
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN LTD
DOI: 10.1057/s41295-018-0130-5
Keywords
Public opinion; Immigration; Responsiveness; NUTS region; Dyadic ratios algorithm; Time-series cross-sectional (TSCS)
Categories
Funding
- Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
- ESRC [ES/L016664/1] Funding Source: UKRI
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Throughout recent decades, social science studies have systematically reported that citizens respond to their macro-social environments. While this is typically true in highly visible and salient policy domains, scholarship remains ambiguous about which macro-environmental factors are at the origins of citizens' opinions on immigration. We contribute to this debate by theorising three factors that have the potential to move immigration opinions and subsequently testing their empirical relevance. We most notably emphasise the role of immigration itself and ask whether and how increasing immigration levels affect immigration opinions. We then examine to what extent the regional power structure and economic hardship interplay with this relationship. Through the dyadic ratios algorithm, we estimate a unique set of immigration opinion measures across regions in Belgium, France and the UK between 1990 and 2015. When modelling these measures, our findings are threefold. First, citizens are responsive to their environments, and specifically to immigration. Second, citizens become more favourable towards immigrants when immigration levels increase. Third, we find evidence that decentralisation (regional power) conditions this empirical relationship, while there is little to no indication that economic conditions affect immigration opinions, either directly or indirectly.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available