The nature of anti-immigrant sentiment in post-socialist Russia

Abstract

The main aim of this study was to investigate whether the competition and cultural theoretical models that have received solid empirical support in the context of Western European societies can explain anti-foreigner sentiment in post-socialist Russia as a society searching for new national identity borders. Data obtained from the third round of the European Social Survey (2006) indicate a high level of anti-foreigner sentiment in contemporary Russia -more than 60% of Russians claimed that immigrants undermine the cultural life of the country, and almost 60% claimed that immigration is bad for the economy of the country. Our multivariate analysis showed that the two sets of individual-level predictors of anti-foreigner sentiment -the socioeconomic position of individuals (as suggested by the competition model) and conservative views and ideologies (as suggested by the cultural model) -are not meaningful in predicting anti foreigner sentiment in post-socialist Russia. The results are discussed from a comparative sociology perspective and in the context of the Russian society.

Ethnic Hierarchy and Public Attitudes towards Immigrants in Russia

“…Hagendoorn et al noted that it was also found in other countries and that "a common element in these hierarchies is that After incorporating all the individual level predictors and accounting for regional heterogeneity our models leave about 95% of the outcome variance unexplained. This is consistent with the results reported previously by Gorodzeisky et al (2014) who noticed a much weaker predictive power of the models explaining attitudes towards immigrants in Russia compared to other European countries. Individual socio-economic characteristics that are standard in sociological research fail to structure the attitudes of Russians, and knowing a person's sex, age, level of education, occupation, ethnicity and location provides us with very little information about their views on immigration.…”

The Role of Foreign Migration in the Changing Socio-Spatial Differentiation of Prague

“…Stratifikační teorie přikládá význam zejména diskriminaci cizinců na trhu s bydlením, jež vede k segmentaci realitního trhu a stratifikaci čtvrtí ve městě podle dostupnosti cizincům [Brown, Chung 2008;Walton 2012]. V postsocialistické společnosti potvrzují nezanedbatelný význam antiimigračních postojů studie z Ruska [Gorodzeisky, Glikman, Maskileyson 2015], Maďarska [Bimbi 2011], Polska [Meuleman, Davidov, Billiet 2009] či Česka [Burjanek 2001]. Prokázána byla též etnická diferenciace trhu s bydlením [Hess, Tammaru, Leetmaa 2012], restrikce vůči nabývání nemovitostí cizinci [Hodgson, Cullinan, Campbell 1999; Gürlich 2011] a jiné diskriminační praktiky majitelů bytů vůči cizincům [Šmídová, Šafr 2009].…”

Ethnic Discrimination in Multi-ethnic Societies: Evidence from Russia

“…A number of previous studies used survey data to explore attitudes towards immigrants in Russia. Antiimmigrant sentiment is stronger in Russia than in most other European countries, whereas the explanatory power of the models that try to predict attitudes towards immigrants with the indicators of socio-economic position and the attitudinal variables is much lower (Gorodzeisky, Glikman and Maskileyson, 2015;Bessudnov, 2016), although explanations based on group threat and economic competition theories cannot be dismissed (Bahry, 2016). Ethnic Russians are on average more negative about immigrants than ethnic minorities (Gorodzeisky and Glikman, 2017), and the opposition towards immigration is often based on racial prejudice (Gorodzeisky, 2019).…”