Abstract
During the last decade, many European countries have faced sizeable immigration inflows accompanied by high prevalence of negative sentiments toward immigrants among majority members of the host societies. We propose that basic human values are one important determinant of such negative attitudes, and we seek to explain variation across countries in the strength of the effects of values. Based on Schwartz’ (1992, 1994) basic human value theory, we hypothesize that universalism values are conducive to positive attitudes toward immigration, while conformity-tradition reinforce anti-immigration sentiments. We furthermore hypothesize that these value effects are moderated by two contextual variables. Both value effects are expected to be weaker in countries with a higher level of cultural embeddedness. Furthermore, negative effects of conformity-tradition values are hypothesized to be cushioned by a lower proportion of immigrants in the country. A multilevel analysis of data from 24 countries from the fourth round of the European Social Survey (2008–2009) supports these hypotheses. Moreover, we demonstrate that the measurement properties of the theoretical constructs exhibit equivalence across countries, thereby justifying statistical comparisons.
Zusammenfassung
Im letzten Jahrzehnt sind viele europäische Länder von einer beträchtlichen Zuwanderung betroffen gewesen, begleitet von negativen Einstellungen der Majorität gegenüber den Immigranten. Wir schlagen vor, dass Werte eine wichtige Determinante solcher negativen Einstellungen sind, und erklären die Variation in der Stärke der Effekte von Werten in den einzelnen Ländern. Auf der Grundlage der Theorie grundlegender menschlicher Werte von Schwartz (1992, 1994) nehmen wir an, dass Universalismus Werte zu positiver Einstellung gegenüber der Zuwanderung führen werden; im Gegensatz dazu führen Konformität und Tradition zu immigrationsfeindlichen Gefühlen. Wir nehmen ferner an, dass diese Wirkungen von Werten durch zwei Kontext-Variablen moderiert werden. Beide Effekte von Werten sind niedriger in Ländern mit einem höheren Grad von kultureller Einbettung, und weiter, negative Effekte der Werte-Konformität und Tradition werden vermutlich durch einen niedrigen Anteil von Immigranten in einem Land gedämpft. Eine Mehrebenen-Analyse mit Daten von 24 Ländern der vierten Welle des European Social Survey (2008 bis 2009) stützen diese Hypothesen. Darüber hinaus zeigen wir, dass die Messeigenschaften der theoretischen Konstrukte über die Länder hinweg äquivalent sind und deshalb die statistischen Vergleiche rechtfertigen.
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Notes
We employ the Schwartz value theory rather than the Inglehart theory (e.g., Inglehart and Baker 2000) mainly for three reasons. First, Schwartz (1992, 1994) makes a better theoretical and empirical distinction between values and attitudes. Such a distinction is crucial for using values to explain attitudes and for guaranteeing discriminant validity between the concepts. Second, Schwartz makes a clear distinction between individual-level and societal-level values whereas Inglehart does not make such a distinction on the measurement level. We propose mechanisms to explain attitudes toward immigration on the individual level. Therefore, the Schwartz theory is better suited to test them empirically. Finally, the database we chose to test our propositions is the European Social Survey, which includes measures of anti-immigrant sentiments across a large set of European countries. This dataset included measurements for Schwartz’ rather than Inglehart’s values. See Becker et al. (2012) and Datler et al. (2012) for a discussion about differences between the two theories.
In many empirical studies it was not possible to distinguish between tradition and conformity (see, e.g., Davidov 2010). Therefore, we decided to unify them in this study. This does not contradict the theory due to their shared motivation and proximal location in the value space. We did not use security as a predictor because of the different meaning it may have across countries which may lead to conceptual confusion. Furthermore, in additional exploratory analyses, security only has a relatively small effect because of its close content to conformity and tradition.
Our choice to focus on cultural embeddedness rather than on collectivism is not only justified based on theoretical considerations, but is also supported by empirical arguments. We reproduced the analyses presented below using collectivism as a moderator for value effects (results not shown but are available upon request). Cross-level interactions for collectivism are insignificant (with Tradition-Conformity) or considerably weaker than is the case for cultural embeddedness.
For further documentation about the data collection procedures, see http://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/. Data can be downloaded from http://ess.nsd.uib.no/.
Data on embeddedness across countries may be provided by the 4th author upon request.
The two countries with the largest share of non-EU immigrants are Estonia and Latvia. These countries host a very large minority group of ethnic Russians who have lived there for an extended period of time but did not receive citizenship after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Because of this specific context in the Baltic States, the percentage of non-EU immigrants might represent a different reality and our indicator might lack comparability. To rule out the possibility that this distorts our conclusions, we replicated all analyses in this paper excluding Estonia and Latvia. Results (available upon request) are virtually identical, and do not alter the conclusions.
The full analyses are available from the first author.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Lisa Trierweiler for the English proof of the manuscript. The work of the first author was supported by the Scientific Exchange Programme—SCIEX (Switzerland) and the URPP program, Social Networks, University of Zurich. The work of the third and fourth authors on this paper was supported by the Higher School of Economics (HSE), Moscow, Basic Research Program (International Laboratory of Socio-Cultural Research).
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Davidov, E., Meulemann, B., Schwartz, S. et al. Individual values, cultural embeddedness, and anti-immigration sentiments: Explaining differences in the effect of values on attitudes toward immigration across Europe. Köln Z Soziol 66 (Suppl 1), 263–285 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11577-014-0274-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11577-014-0274-5
Keywords
- Basic human values
- Attitudes toward immigration
- Multilevel analysis
- Cross-level interaction
- European Social Survey
- Measurement equivalence