A migration effect? Comparing the acculturation of Russian migrant populations in Western Europe to Russians in three former soviet countries on attitudes towards government responsibility

Abstract

In a number of recent articles migration has been used as a ‘natural experiment’, which can give insights into the general mechanisms of attitude formation. Studies from the field of psychology, however, suggest that the process of acculturation might be affected by migrants being in a particular situation. If such a ‘migration effect’ exists, then the conclusions on the more general mechanisms of attitude formation based on migration studies have to be rethought. We test this using a novel study design comparing acculturation in which we compare attitudes in the Russian diaspora left behind, in Estonia, Latvia and the Ukraine, by the collapse of the Soviet Union to those of Russian migrants in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. The results show that there are no differences in acculturation between the diaspora in the East and the migrants in the West and therefore no ‘migration effect’ on acculturation.