Members of the ethnic majority tend to view immigrants and ethnic minorities as less willing to contribute to the collective. Why is this the case? I argue that in Europe, ethnic attributes signal citizens’ socioeconomic resources, cultural values, and norm compliance and that these factors, rather than ethnic identities per se, explain why citizens are expected (not) to contribute. Through a novel conjoint experimental design in Denmark that manipulated respondents’ access to information about these different mechanisms, the argument finds support. First, in information-sparse environments, ethnic majority members expect that minority members contribute substantially less to the provision of public goods than majority members. Second, this ethnic bias is reduced by each of the three mechanisms and explained away once information on all three is available. This demonstrates that negative expectations toward minorities operate through multiple, complementary channels and that stereotype-countering information can reduce the majority-minority expectation gap.

Existing research argues that malapportionment primarily favours rural areas, resulting in conservative biases of electoral systems. In this paper, we provide a new perspective on the study of apportionment processes by identifying the institutional design under which malapportionment may favour other regions. Because of the geographical sorting of non-citizen residents, we argue that regions with high shares of non-citizen residents benefit from population-based apportionment, whereas the spatial sorting of non-citizens does not affect malapportionment in the case of citizen-based apportionment. Empirically, we use sub-national data from ten advanced democracies to forward evidence that differences in apportionment mechanisms and district-level shares of non-citizen residents systematically influence malapportionment. Our findings suggest that the impact of malapportionment on political representation and public policies may be more heterogeneous than previously thought.

Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial group in the US electorate, yet they are significantly under-represented in political office. How do predominantly immigrant groups like Asian Americans close this representation gap? We build on existing theories of minority representation and immigrant assimilation by highlighting the importance of a group’s political incorporation into American society. We argue that the representation of minority immigrant groups in political office requires social integration and the acquisition of civic resources, processes that can take considerable time. Using new data on Asian American state legislators spanning half a century, we find that immigration in prior decades is associated with greater political representation, while contemporaneous population size has either no independent impact or a negative one. Other indicators of immigrant social integration, including citizenship status, language ability, education, and income, also predict the likelihood of co-racial representation in political office. Our results suggest political representation gaps of immigrant groups narrow over time, though this may be a non-linear process. Our findings also imply that the least integrated members of immigrant groups are the most likely to be affected by representational deficits.

We seek to unpack and complicate traditional findings of Black Americans’ ambivalent progressivism of immigrants and immigration by seriously considering gender as an analytic tool. Specifically, we aim to highlight how Black women’s political and social uniqueness contextualizes their perception of attitudes toward immigrants and immigration. We argue that Black women’s unique race and gendered experiences inform Black women’s attitudes and preferences regarding immigration and immigrants. Further, we take their heterogeneity seriously because Black women are not a monolith. Using the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-election Survey (CMPS), we argue that perceptions of shared disadvantage, high levels of woman of color (WoC) linked fate and intersectional solidarity, and strong Democratic identification will positively influence African American women and Black immigrant women’s progressive attitudes toward immigrants and immigration compared to Black women who have lower levels of shared discrimination, WoC linked fate, intersectional solidarity, or have weak Democratic identification.

We develop a method to assess population knowledge about any given topic. We define, and rationalize, types of beliefs that form the ‘knowledge spectrum’. Using a sample of over 7000 UK residents, we estimate these beliefs with respect to three topics: an animal-based diet, alcohol consumption and immigration. We construct an information-campaign effectiveness index (ICEI) that predicts the success of an information campaign. Information resistance is greatest for animal-based diets, and the ICEI is highest for immigration. We test the predictive power of our ICEI by simulating information campaigns, which produces supportive evidence. Our method can be used by any government or company that wants to explore the success of an information campaign.

Several studies have shown a relationship between the stocks of migrants and country-level investment in the home country; however the mechanism through which this relationship operates is still unexplored. We use a field experiment in which participants who are recent immigrants send information about risky decisions to others in their social network in their home country. The results demonstrate how this information influences decisions in the home country. We find that the advice given by family members and decisions made by friends significantly affects an individual’s risky decision-making.

In this study we conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment with low-income Hispanics in three neighborhoods in a large city in the U.S. to investigate how identity and social exclusion influences individual contributions to fund local public goods. We find that while the strength of identity has a significant and positive impact on individual contributions to local public goods, the perception of social exclusion significantly decreases contributions. Our findings thus suggest factors that may impede full civic participation, and shed important light on potential policies to increase integration of immigrants and ethnic minorities into mainstream society.

A prominent paradigm demonstrates many White Americans respond negatively to information on their declining population share. But this paradigm considers this “racial shift” in a single hierarchy-challenging context that produces similar status threat responses across conceptually distinct outcomes, undercutting the ability to both explain the causes of Whites’ social and political responses and advance theorizing about native majorities’ responses to demographic change. We test whether evidence for Whites’ responses to demographic change varies across three distinct hierarchy-challenging contexts: society at large, culture, and politics. We find little evidence any racial shift information instills status threat or otherwise changes attitudes or behavioral intentions, and do not replicate evidence for reactions diverging by left- versus right-wing political attachments. We conclude with what our well-powered (n = 2100) results suggest about a paradigm and intervention used prominently, with results cited frequently, to understand native majorities’ responses to demographic change and potential challenges to multiracial democracy.

Political communication on immigration is often highly moralized, with parties making claims to fundamental beliefs about right and wrong. Yet, what drives parties to use this rhetoric remains unexplored. Contributing to research on parties’ positional shifts on immigration, this study examines their strategic use of moral language in immigration discourse. To this end, we develop multilingual moral dictionaries to analyze parliamentary immigration speeches from eight Western democracies over six decades. While party-level factors do not explain moral language use, increased elite polarization on the issue is associated with greater moralization among all parties. Qualitative analysis shows that moral language is used overwhelmingly to attack political opponents, highlighting its divisive nature. These findings serve as a corrective to the notion that extreme, anti-immigrant, opposition parties are the main drivers of the moralization of immigration; instead, the broader political climate crucially shapes party incentives to (de)moralize.

In this study, we focus on European immigration attitudes in the perspective of deservingness perceptions and political orientation. Our data are conducted from the European Social Survey (2016) database, which contains 21 European countries and 39,400 participants. We used the multilevel method to study the relationship between immigration attitudes and deservingness perceptions. The results demonstrate that the more negative deservingness perceptions are, the more negative immigration attitudes more likely become. Moreover, country-level political orientation moderate the relationship between immigration attitudes and deservingness perceptions. Deservingness perceptions have a greater role in explaining immigration attitudes on countries with political left-context, which gives us a new perspective to understand the public debates about immigration.

Since the 1980s, the study of opinions towards immigration has grown exponentially throughout European scholarship. Most existing studies, however, are limited in their scope and do not specifically refer to an aggregate phenomenon, but rather an individual one. This study seeks to establish empirically whether aggregate public immigration preferences across 13 European democracies relate systematically to national socio-political indicators or other underlying societal mechanics. Particularly, we analyze four mechanisms more in-depth, namely the predictive values of economic deprivation, immigration policy, immigration flows and the political environment. To do so we rely on country-level level data and update a unique dataset of immigration opinions. We find that (ii) economic deprivation is an important correlate of more restrictive immigration opinions, (ii) immigration opinions respond thermostatically to immigration policy, (iii) the non-asylum inflow of foreigners further restricts immigration opinions, and (iv) the immigration positions of government and opposition parties have antithetical effects on immigration opinions.

The aim of this Article is to present a general and nonexhaustive overview of the legal infrastructures that configure cross-border movement in Latin America. It draws on the mobility approach, regime interaction, and—legal—infrastructural studies, which, together, provide a tentative analytical framework for the legal infrastructuring processes that we observe around border regulation in Latin America, an, arguably, understudied but core mobility hotspot. We present—in the form of several vignettes—different outcomes of infrastucturing processes which either enable or impede cross border mobility. This approach reveals the dynamic nature of law surrounding mobility and its apparent contradictions and unintended consequences. It concludes that the shift to an infrastructural account of the law can help us gain a more holistic and, therefore, more realistic understanding of how the law works over time, how it infrastructures crossborder mobility beyond and sometimes against states’ intentions and expectations, and how people on the move have more agency than the snapshot image of—forced—migration law conveys.