Responsiveness and the macro-origins of immigration opinions: Evidence from Belgium, France and the UK

Abstract

Throughout recent decades, social science studies have systematically reported that citizens respond to their macro-social environments. While this is typically true in highly visible and salient policy domains, scholarship remains ambiguous about which macro-environmental factors are at the origins of citizens’ opinions on immigration. We contribute to this debate by theorising three factors that have the potential to move immigration opinions and subsequently testing their empirical relevance. We most notably emphasise the role of immigration itself and ask whether and how increasing immigration levels affect immigration opinions. We then examine to what extent the regional power structure and economic hardship interplay with this relationship. Through the dyadic ratios algorithm, we estimate a unique set of immigration opinion measures across regions in Belgium, France and the UK between 1990 and 2015. When modelling these measures, our findings are threefold. First, citizens are responsive to their environments, and specifically to immigration. Second, citizens become more favourable towards immigrants when immigration levels increase. Third, we find evidence that decentralisation (regional power) conditions this empirical relationship, while there is little to no indication that economic conditions affect immigration opinions, either directly or indirectly.