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Political Trust and Support for Immigration in the European Mass Public

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Abstract

What factors shape European opinion on immigration? Past work has largely pointed to evaluations of various immigrant groups and the cultural, criminal, and/or economic threats they may pose to society, but has overlooked how evaluations of the broader political system matter. Using cross-sectional and panel data from the European Social Survey (ESS), we find that higher levels of political trust are associated with increased public support for allowing a variety of different groups to immigrate, including non-Europeans, Muslims, and Roma. We also find that political trust is positively associated with support for a generous and accommodating refugee policy. We attribute these findings to greater mass confidence in the political system’s ability to protect the native population from any perceived immigration-related threats. Overall, these findings suggest that political trust, which is near historic lows, has important implications for understanding public opinion toward immigration, a highly salient issue in contemporary European politics.

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Notes

  1. See Ceobanu and Escandell (2010) and Hainmueller and Hopkins (2014) for relevant review articles.

  2. The Supplemental Appendix and the replication code/data are publicly available in the Political Behavior Dataverse. https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/polbehavior.

  3. This survey was fielded in 21 countries between August, 2014 and December, 2015. The response rates ranged from 31.4% (Germany) to 67.9% (Czech Republic). https://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/data/deviations_7.html.

  4. Because we are interested in the European continent, we omit observations from Israel (N = 2,562) from all ESS analyses. However, the results are nearly identical if all 21 countries are included instead.

  5. Most of the ESS interviews (58%) began and ended in 2014. The vast majority of ESS interviews (80%) were completed before the end of April, 2015, when the migration crisis became especially salient. https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/stories/2015/12/56ec1ebde/2015-year-europes-refugee-crisis.html.

  6. Given the importance of immigrant characteristics such as skill level, country of origin, and religion in shaping public support for immigration (e.g., Bansak et al., 2016), we opted to examine attitudes toward these questions separately rather than combining them into a single index. ESS respondents in the Czech Republic were not asked the first question (poorer countries in Europe). This is the only immigration question that is not asked of all ESS respondents.

  7. National economic satisfaction, national government satisfaction, and ideological self-placement are single-item questions. Social trust, self-transcendence, and conservation are indices constructed from multiple questions (α ranges from 0.707 to 0.760). All of these attitudinal variables are re-scaled to range from 0 to 1; this can facilitate comparison between coefficients. See Supplemental Appendix A for greater detail.

  8. National government satisfaction is correlated, but not perfectly so (Pearson’s r = 0.647), with our measure of political trust. This suggests that these concepts are related, but not synonymous.

  9. Human values, which have an especially large “effect” on immigration support, are likely capturing additional unobserved variables such as personality traits and/or feelings toward various social groups and other cultures.

  10. We designate governments as either left/center-left or right/center-right on immigration using the CHES expert rating variable IMMIGRATE_POLICY. https://www.chesdata.eu/2014-chapel-hill-expert-survey. This variable ranges from 0 to 10, with 0 indicating that the head governing party is “extreme left” on immigration and 10 indicating that the head governing party is “extreme right” on immigration. Left/Center-Left governments are those in which the head governing party scored from 0 to 5 on this variable. Right/Center-Right governments are those in which the head governing party scored from 6–10. See Supplemental Appendix A for greater detail. In our ESS sample (2014–2015), the following countries had a government headed by a party that was rated as favoring a left/center-left immigration policy (Sweden, Switzerland, Slovenia, Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Lithuania, France, Finland, and Estonia). The following countries had a government headed by a party that was rated as favoring a right/center-right immigration policy (Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Netherlands, Hungary, United Kingdom, and Spain). We also replicate this analysis by using CHES ratings of these parties’ overall government ideology (LRGEN). The results are substantively similar (LRGEN and IMMIGRATE_POLICY correlate at r = 0.747), i.e., there is a positive relationship between political trust and immigration support in countries with both left/center-left and right/center-right governments.

  11. Because we split the sample by respondents’ ideological self-identification, we omit this as a control variable in the regression models.

  12. The large sample size of the ESS permits us to split the data into three groups and still have a reliable sample size for each (approximately 1/3 of the ESS sample for Left, Center, and Right). We believe that this is a superior approach to interacting political trust and ideological self-identification as it does not make assumptions about linearity (Hainmueller et al., 2019) and also permits the other control variables to differentially shape each of our dependent variables.

  13. See the following link for greater detail. https://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/methodology/methodological_research/modes_of_data_collection/cronos.html.

  14. We refer to the 8th round ESS responses as “ESS8” and follow the CRONOS codebook in referring to the subsequent seven internet re-interviews as “Waves 0–6.”

  15. Wave 3 took place from June, 2017 - August, 2017. Wave 6 took place from January, 2018 - February, 2018. https://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/docs/cronos/CRONOS_user_guide_e01_1.pdf

  16. We also tested an alternative coding scheme for immigration support (1 = allow none; 2 = allow a few; 3 = allow some; 4 = allow many), re-scaled to range from 0 to 1. This did not substantively change the main substantive findings of our cross-lagged models in Table 2. That is, our results still show that political trust seems to drive immigration support, rather than the reverse.

  17. Our findings here need not be in conflict with McLaren’s past work. Indeed, we believe that people can be both (1) concerned about immigration and/or government’s handling of this issue, which can depress trust in the political system (McLaren, 2012a) and (2) have low trust in the political system, which serves to further depress their support for immigration (Macdonald, 2020). Fully examining this possible dynamic relationship is beyond the scope of this paper.

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  1. University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    David Macdonald

  2. Independent Scholar, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Teresa Cornacchione

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Macdonald, D., Cornacchione, T. Political Trust and Support for Immigration in the European Mass Public. Polit Behav 45, 491–510 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09714-w

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