Attitudes towards immigration and their antecedents

Abstract

This proposal is for a repeat of the module on immigration attitudes fielded in the first round of the ESS in 2002/3, which has been extensively used in cross-national research and has made a major contribution to policy debates. A decade on, major political, cultural, economic and demographic developments make this a highly opportune time for a repeat module. The proposal is to replicate those items that have been most widely used by scholars and that have been shown to have good methodological properties. These include items designed to measure attitudes to levels of immigration, the criteria for accepting migrants, attitudes to integration policy and multiculturalism, together with measures of explanatory concepts such as realistic threat and social distance. Drawing on the state-of-the-art literature, we plan to supplement these items with new items designed to strengthen the measurement of symbolic threat and of contact with migrants and minorities (which recent research suggests can be of considerable explanatory power), together with additional items designed to cover topics of current policy and theoretical debate.