Support for the political community in a community that doesn’t support you: immigrant youths’ exposure to anti-immigrant attitudes

Abstract

Expressions of hostility in immigrants’ surrounding environment have been shown to negatively influence their relation to the political society. The impact of such contextual hostility on immigrant youths and political community support however remains unexplored. Filling these gaps, I test the hypothesis that contextual hostility decreases immigrant youths’ political community support, captured with a sense of national pride. In addition, I test two rivalling hypotheses regarding the influence of contextual hostility on the so-called second generation of immigrants, expecting the impact to be either weaker or stronger among the second generation of immigrants in comparison to the first generation. Analysing survey data on the political beliefs of youths in secondary school classes in Sweden, my main finding is that immigrant youths in school classes with high levels of anti-immigrant attitudes are less supportive of the political community, entailing a potential legitimacy problem for the democratic system. The impact of anti-immigrant attitudes among the second generation of immigrants is in turn weak or non-existing.