Immigration is of growing significance to the demographic makeup of Western Europe. A long-standing and highly disputed question is whether a larger number of immigrants are associated with more negative attitudes toward immigration or whether the reverse is true. Previous studies yielded contradictory results on various levels of analysis (national, regional, local). These inconsistencies may partly be linked to what is known as the 'modifiable areal unit problem' in spatial analysis. This article seeks to address this issue by analyzing the relationship between the percentage foreign-born and perceived group threat in 15 Western European countries on the national as well as on three differing regional levels (N = 70, 207, and 624 regions, respectively), together with survey data from the European Values Study's fourth wave. I expect threat effects to operate through national communication systems while contact and habituation to immigrants to work on the regional level. Consistent with theoretical expectations, the results show a positive correlation between the national proportion of immigrants and perceived threat, while the coefficients are negative on the regional level. More immigration might thus lead to a more negative evaluation of the presence of immigrants in European countries, but apparently not within the regions where most of the newcomers reside. Two recent examples illustrate this seemingly paradoxical relationship. As a methodological result, effect size and statistical significance vary with the delimitation of the regional units of analysis (Nomenclature des Unités Territoriales Statistiques (NUTS)-1, -2, or -3). This suggests that research in this field should pay more attention to how and why spatial units are defined.

There is a long-standing dispute on the extent to which population growth causes environmental degradation. Most studies on this link have so far analyzed crosscountry data, finding contradictory results. However, these country-level analyses suffer from the high level of dissimilarity between world regions and strong collinearity of population growth, income, and other factors. We argue that regional-level analyses can provide more robust evidence, isolating the population effect from national particularities such as policies or culture. We compile a dataset of 1062 regions within 22 European countries and analyze the effect from population growth on carbon dioxide (CO 2) emissions and urban land use change between 1990 and 2006. Data are analyzed using panel regressions, spatial econometric models, and propensity score matching where regions with high population growth are matched to otherwise highly similar regions exhibiting significantly less growth. We find a considerable effect from regional population growth on carbon dioxide (CO 2) emissions and urban land use increase in Western Europe.

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