Immigration Threat, Partisanship, and Democratic Citizenship: Evidence from the US, UK, and Germany

Abstract

Politicians and media frequently invoke immigration threats to shape public opinion. But how do outgroup threat frames affect norms of citizenship, including behavior, liberal value commitments, and national belonging? This paper presents evidence from an embedded vignette survey experiment in three immigrant-receiving societies: United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. I find immigration threats are filtered through partisanship in polarized settings, and asymmetrically affect norms of “good citizenship” among individuals on the partisan left. However, we see variation within this group: Democrats (US) de-value norms of behavior, like voting and being informed, while Labor supports (UK) repudiate liberal norms like tolerance and rally around national belonging. By contrast, in Germany, we observe more consensus in citizenship norm responses. The strong effect of immigration threat framing on the partisan left brings our attention to the strategic use of immigration discourse to move traditionally sympathetic citizens away from democratic civic ideals.

The Ukrainian Refugee Crisis and the Politics of Public Opinion: Evidence from Hungary

“…Our findings make two main contributions to the literature on public opinion towards refugees and migrants, especially in times of crisis (Goodman 2021;Vachudova 2020;Hangartner et al 2019;Dinas et al 2019;Kustov, Laaker, and Reller 2021;Bansak, Hain-mueller, and Hangartner 2016;Brader, Valentino, and Suhay 2008). First, we show that mass public opinion is indeed responsive to exogenous refugee crises.…”

“Good Citizens” in Democratic Hard Times

“…Put another way, the question of "what make a good citizen" was without reference to specific national threats. In a series of survey experiments elsewhere, I show that citizens respond to information on foreign interference in elections and polarization (Goodman 2022), as well as an immigration threat (Goodman 2021), by valuing civic obligations that protect the interests of their party, which are not always compatible with the goals of protecting democracy. In brief, I find that responses to the corrosive problem of polarization reflect status quo incentives, where incumbent partisans remain unmoved and challenger partisans support tolerance and national pride.…”

Populism and the print media: the case of Japan

“…Japanese media frames, in combination with the dissensus in opinion among LDP politicians and ‘institutional fragmentation’ among bureaucracies (Chiavacci, 2017; Strausz, 2019) means that elite cues vary and do not exacerbate immigration as a divisive public issue. This matters because research also shows that citizens respond to immigration information (Van Hauwaert and English, 2019; Goodman, 2021) and that changes in the valence or frame of that information (e.g., cultural as opposed to economic threat) can alter attitudes and policy preferences (Krzyżanowski et al , 2018). The absence of a crisis frame is not simply due to low numbers of immigrants as before the COVID border restrictions, Japan was experiencing a wave of immigration.…”