How national identification enhances anti-immigrant prejudice: Development and empirical test of individual-, contextual-, and cross-level explanations

Abstract

Social scientists have long recognized that national identification can enhance anti-immigrant prejudice. Most studies in this field, however, have tended to focus on individual-level relations only. Although this line of research has much to offer (e.g., Blank and Schmidt, 2003), we suggest that an even more comprehensive understanding of how national identification links to anti-immigrant prejudice becomes attainable when characteristics of the proximate social contexts individuals live in are taken into account. In this chapter, we address this task in the following manner: First, as a theoretical contribution, we specify and integrate individual-, contextual- and rosslevel explanations on how national identification relates to anti-immigrant prejudice. Second, as a methodological contribution, we examine our theoretical expectations using latent variable contextual models - a powerful and flexible combination of structural equation and multilevel modeling. Third, for our empirical tests, we utilize unique large-scale survey data collected among students within German secondary schools. Doing so is critical, for it offers potentially important knowledge for policy interventions aiming to alter the prevalence of anti-immigrant attitudes in educational settings.