ESRA 2025 Preliminary Program
All time references are in CEST
Studying attitudes toward immigrants 3 |
| Session Organisers |
Professor Eldad Davidov (University of Cologne)
Dr Marcus Eisentraut (University of Cologne)
Professor Anastasia Gorodzeisky (Tel Aviv University)
Professor Dina Maskileyson (Université du Luxembourg)
Ms Leona Przechomski (University of Cologne)
Professor Peter Schmidt (University of Giessen)
Professor Moshe Semyonov (Tel Aviv University)
Dr Alice Ramos (University of Lisbon)
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| Time | Friday 18 July, 11:00 - 12:30 |
| Room |
Ruppert Blauw - 0.53 |
Studying attitudes toward immigrants
Session organizers in alphabetical order:
Eldad Davidov, Marcus Eisentraut, Anastasia Gorodzeisky, Dina Maskileyson, Leona Przechomski, Peter Schmidt and Moshe Semyonov
Europe has been experiencing large flows of immigration either from outside or within the EU. People come to Europe for work and study, but also escape wars, political instabilities, repression, or poverty. The Syrian refugee crisis of 2015/6, poverty and political instability in Africa, and the Russian war against Ukraine have pushed people to flee from their countries and try to seek safety and better life in Europe. These flows have brought attitudes towards migration to the forefront of public debates and resulted in political polarization in Europe. Europeans are divided not only in their attitudes toward immigrants and refugees but also in how they believe their country should deal with these immigration flows. This division is evident in the rise of support for and popularity of extreme right-wing parties in different European countries. The session is going to cover ongoing studies that utilize different methods of survey data collection and analysis to explain variation across individuals and societies in attitudes toward newcomers into Europe. Scholars are encouraged to submit studies which use survey data including comparative and longitudinal data and employ variable-oriented or typological approaches to explain attitudes toward immigrants and refugees in Europe.
Keywords: Attitudes toward immigrants and refugees, cross-country comparisons, longitudinal analysis
Papers
Public Responses to Jihadist Terrorism on Social Media
Dr Christian Czymara (Goethe University Frankfurt) - Presenting Author
In recent years, several major terror attacks linked to political Islam have shaken Europe. Beyond their immediate devastating consequences, these events also affect intergroup relations. This study integrates terror management theory and group threat theory to examine responses to terrorism on social media. Using Keyword-Assisted Topic Modeling, it analyzes over 100,000 time-stamped and geo-coded Tweets on immigration and related topics across four languages in the week following eleven major terrorist attacks in nine European cities posted by users located in the city of the attack. Unlike traditional topic modeling approaches, keyATM incorporates pre-specified keywords, enhancing both the precision and interpretability of results while mitigating the impact of researcher subjectivity. The findings reveal that theoretically expected topics such as nationalism and prejudice, as well as counter-bigotry activism and prosocial narratives, appear across all languages. Notably, inclusive and empathetic topics predominate over group threat-related themes in all language datasets. Temporal analyses indicate that nationalism spikes statistically significantly in the first two days post-attack across all cases, while prejudice shows mixed temporal patterns across cases. In contrast, counter-bigotry and prosocial topics gain prominence later, aligning with theoretical expectations. These results underscore the dynamic nature of public discourse on social media following terrorist attacks.
How Traits and Context Shape Attitudes Towards Refugees – A Vignette Study on Social Distance and Acceptance in Germany
Dr Knize Veronika (Institute for Employment Research (IAB))
Professor Frank van Tubergen (NIDI-KNAW (univ. Groningen) and Utrecht University)
Professor Marita Jacob (University of Cologne)
Dr Bernhard Christoph (Institute for Employment Research (IAB)) - Presenting Author
In recent years, in Germany – as in most of Europe – there were two waves of refugees that made up for a major part of overall immigration: Syrians, which fled the civil war in their home country and which mainly arrived in 2015 and the following years as well as refugees that fled from Ukraine following the Russian invasion in 2022.
Both groups of migrants varied substantially regarding their demographic characteristics, with Syrian migrants having a higher likelihood to be male, single, and holding the Islamic faith and Ukrainian migrants being more likely to be female, living with kids and being Christians. To disentangle the degree to which these dimensions are connected to respondents' perceptions of these refugee groups, we use a vignette-based design asking respondents to evaluate different refugee characteristics.
Our vignette study is part of a larger survey the IAB-OPAL panel study. Our module was included in waves 3 and 5. Overall, the data cover around 8.000 respondents who judged around 24.000 vignettes.
While previous research has mainly focused on the connection between refugee characteristics and formal acceptance criteria, as e.g. the right of residence or the right to work, we ask respondents to evaluate the vignettes answering to four items representing different degrees of social distance. Moreover, we also analyze how judgments of those sharing certain traits with the refugees (e.g. religion or being migrants themselves) might differ from those of other respondents. In addition, as we have panel data, we might not merely analyze how respondents’ individual living conditions (as e.g. income, employment/unemployment etc.) affect their attitudes towards refugees but might, moreover, analyze how changes in these living conditions might change their attitudes.
Local Exposure to Refugees Differentially Affects Welfare Chauvinism: Causal Evidence From German Panel Data
Mr Jakob Eicheler (Universität Duisburg-Essen) - Presenting Author
The impact of the 2015 peak in refugee applications in Europe on immigration attitudes and far right voting is widely studied. However, little is known on how local exposure to refugees affected welfare chauvinism, i.e. the support to exclude immigrants from welfare services. This is the first paper to provide causal evidence on this question. The paper tests preregistered hypotheses derived from intergroup contact and economic and cultural intergroup threat theory using original panel data from Germany (2015/2016/2017, N ≈ 1,500) and administrative data on the allocation of refugees to municipalities. A continuous difference-in-differences approach leveraging the exogenous allocation finds a larger refugee inflow to have an overall null effect on welfare chauvinism. However, further analysis reveals substantial treatment heterogeneity: At the individual level, those exposed to more economic threat through refugees and those more likely to perceive refugees as a cultural threat increase in welfare chauvinism if exposed to more refugees. At the municipal level, pre-existing ethnic diversity protects against increases in welfare chauvinism, whereas worse economic conditions and a more anti-immigrant political climate contribute to increased welfare chauvinism with larger refugee inflows. Taken together, the results suggest that in Germany, economic and cultural threat perceptions outweighed intergroup contact in certain municipalities. This raises concerns about the exclusion of immigrants from welfare services in the face of increasing ethnic diversity, and may have policy implications in determining the distribution of refugees.
“Stand By Those Who Share Our Values" – How Refugees Fleeing The Taliban Improved European Attitudes Toward Immigration
Mr Joris Frese (European University Institute) - Presenting Author
Several existing studies have found that negative political framing of immigrants increases anti-immigrant public attitudes. I conduct two studies that reveal conditions under which the opposite dynamic unfolds. I argue that when refugees are framed as vulnerable, assimilable, and deserving of help, this should cause a reduction in anti-immigrant sentiment. Analyzing the case of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 and the resulting large-scale refugee movement, I demonstrate that such deservingness frames were frequently employed by journalists and politicians and that European citizens exposed to this framing became more supportive toward immigrants. Leveraging the active field phase of the European Social Survey during the Taliban takeover, I show with a quasi-experimental “Unexpected Event During Survey Design” that the positive framing of refugees during this highly salient event led to a significant immediate and long-term increase in pro-immigration attitudes across Europe. These findings suggest that it is possible for politicians and journalists to effectively reduce xenophobia during large-scale refugee arrivals by highlighting refugees' vulnerability and assimilability.
