Established and Excluded? Immigrants’ Economic Progress, Attitudes toward Immigrants, and the Conditioning Role of Egalitarianism and Intergroup Contact
| Author | Conrad Ziller |
| Published date | 01 February 2022 |
| Date | 01 February 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720953561 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720953561
Political Studies
2022, Vol. 70(1) 236 –256
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321720953561
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Established and Excluded?
Immigrants’ Economic
Progress, Attitudes
toward Immigrants, and
the Conditioning Role of
Egalitarianism and Intergroup
Contact
Conrad Ziller
Abstract
Immigrants’ economic progress, on the one hand, serves as an indicator of successful integration
and should serve to mitigate natives’ concerns about potential economic or welfare state–related
burdens of immigration. On the other hand, the fact of immigrants improving their social status
may also induce perceptions of competition and group-related relative deprivation. This study
examines whether immigrants’ progress leads either to improved attitudes toward immigrants
or to a greater perception of immigration-related threat. Specifically, I focus on how individuals’
egalitarian values and experiences in intergroup contact condition their responses to immigrants’
economic progress. Using data from the European Social Survey 2014, combined with country-
level change scores in income gaps between natives and immigrants, I find that respondents who
encountered negative experiences in intergroup contact respond to immigrants’ progress with
increasing anti-immigrant sentiment. A survey experiment manipulating exposure to information
about group-specific income trends mirrors this finding. The results have important implications
for debates about immigrants’ integration and the economic motives underlying immigration-
related attitudes.
Keywords
immigration, immigrants’ progress, anti-immigrant sentiment, egalitarianism, intergroup contact,
social status
Accepted: 9 August 2020
Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Cologne, Köln, Germany
Corresponding author:
Conrad Ziller, Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Cologne, Albertus Magnus Platz,
50923 Köln, Germany.
Email: ziller@wiso.uni-koeln.de
953561PSX0010.1177/0032321720953561Political StudiesZiller
research-article2020
Article
Ziller 237
Introduction
Immigration is a key political issue in contemporary European politics and has gained
additional relevance in light of developments such as the “refugee crisis” 2014–2016,
electoral successes of anti-immigrant and populist radical right parties throughout Europe,
and an anti-immigrant campaign in the run-up to Brexit (Dinas et al., 2019; Halla et al.,
2017; Hobolt, 2016). Immigration has an impact on citizens’ social policy support
(Alesina and Glaeser, 2004; Schmidt-Catran and Spies, 2016), and immigration-related
threat is interrelated with trust in political authorities (MacDonald, 2020; McLaren,
2015). People differ in the extent to which they perceive threats about immigration, and
given its political relevance, it is important to understand the reasons that underlie this
heterogeneity.
This study examines how immigrants’ economic progress impacts natives’ attitudes
toward immigrants. From the perspective of immigrants’ integration, natives should
regard the economic progress that immigrants make as an indicator of successful integra-
tion, and this in turn should also mitigate concerns about fiscal burdens related to immi-
gration (Czymara and Schmidt-Catran, 2017; Gerber et al., 2017). That said, the very fact
of immigrants improving their social status may also stir up perceptions of zero-sum
competition (i.e. the perception that any gains that another group makes must be at the
expense of one’s own group) and group-based relative deprivation which facilitate anti-
immigrant sentiment and behavior (Bobo, 1999; Esses et al., 2017). The aim of this study
is thus to investigate the conditions under which immigrants’ progress leads either to
improved attitudes toward immigrants or to a greater immigration-related threat.
Two arguments guide this investigation. First, based on their personality structure,
people who endorse social hierarchy and group-based dominance are expected to per-
ceive zero-sum competition from any outgroup (including immigrants) that challenges
the established social status hierarchy (Sidanius and Pratto, 1999). In contrast, those who
advocate egalitarian values should respond with increasingly positive attitudes toward
immigrants’ progress. Second (and drawing from intergroup contact theory), individuals
who have experienced negative intergroup contact with immigrants might be more likely
to develop zero-sum beliefs when they learn that this outgroup is making progress, while
those with predominantly positive contact experiences should respond with rather posi-
tive attitudes toward immigrants’ progress (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2011).
Previous research on immigration-related attitudes has largely focused on symbolic or
cultural motives (Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2014). This study offers a straightforward
way to test predictions on economic self-interest made by theories of realistic group con-
flict and group-based relative deprivation. Drawing on arguments about individual differ-
ences in perceptions of zero-sum competition, I also add important insights into the
conditions under which attitudes toward immigration and immigrants are generated.
Moreover, immigrants’ economic progress reflects an inherently dynamic approach vis-
à-vis the study of intergroup relations, while prior studies often used static indicators of
economic circumstances as an approximation to resource competition.
I test the theoretical arguments by employing observational and experimental data. The
observational study uses comparative survey data from the seventh wave of the European
Social Survey (ESS), merged with macro-level information on over-time changes in income
gaps between immigrants and natives. Results from multilevel regression models show a
systematic interaction between immigrants’ progress and intergroup contact quality, where
respondents who reported predominantly negative contact experiences respond with
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