IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/bjposi/v52y2022i3p1013-1031_2.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Does Immigration Produce a Public Backlash or Public Acceptance? Time-Series, Cross-Sectional Evidence from Thirty European Democracies

Author

Listed:
  • Claassen, Christopher
  • McLaren, Lauren

Abstract

After decades of relatively high inflows of foreign nationals, immigration is now at the center of substantial political divisions in most European countries and has been implicated in one of the most vexing developments in European politics, the rise of the xenophobic right. However, it is not clear whether high levels of immigration actually do cause a public backlash, or whether publics become habituated to, and supportive of, immigration. This study tests these backlash and habituation theories using novel measures of immigration mood and immigration concern produced by combining over 4,000 opinion datapoints across twenty-nine years and thirty countries. The authors find evidence of a public backlash in the short to medium run, where mood turns negative and concern about immigration rises. Yet the study also finds evidence of a longer-run process of habituation that cancels out the backlash effect within one (concern) to three (mood) decades.

Suggested Citation

  • Claassen, Christopher & McLaren, Lauren, 2022. "Does Immigration Produce a Public Backlash or Public Acceptance? Time-Series, Cross-Sectional Evidence from Thirty European Democracies," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 52(3), pages 1013-1031, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:bjposi:v:52:y:2022:i:3:p:1013-1031_2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0007123421000260/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ji, Chengyuan & Jiang, Junyan & Zhang, Yujin, 2024. "Political trust and government performance in the time of COVID-19," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 176(C).
    2. Rohde, Nicholas, 2023. "Economic insecurity, nativism, and the erosion of institutional trust," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 212(C), pages 1017-1028.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:bjposi:v:52:y:2022:i:3:p:1013-1031_2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/jps .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.