Abstract
AbstractThis article analyzes the relationship between the relative position of an ethnic group, as measured by its majority/minority status at a subnational level, and attitudes of its members toward immigrants of different origins. Based on the Russian case, it addresses the question whether the effects of in-group majority status within a region on attitudes toward the general category of immigrants hold regardless of out-group origin and, if not, what may drive this variation. Using data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey of the Higher School of Economics and Bayesian hierarchical structural equation modeling, the study demonstrates that the relative position of an ethnic in-group is of varying importance as a predictor of attitudes toward migrant groups of European versus non-European origin in Russia. A group’s majority status within a region proved to play a role in predicting attitudes toward migrants originating from the “south” (encompassing North and South Caucasus; Central Asia; and China, Vietnam, and Korea) but not toward migrants coming from the “west” (Ukraine and Moldova). We draw on arguments related to the source and the level of threat induced by the out-groups, ethnic hierarchies, and group cues to explain this pattern of results.
Highlights
Given the prevalence of migration processes and integration challenges faced by various receiving societies in today’s world, attitudes toward newcomers have become an increasingly topical issue
It shows that the role of the relative position of an ethnic in-group differs across migrant outgroups of different origin
Both for ethnic Russians and for members of titular nations, the majority status in a region seems to play a role in predicting attitudes toward migrant groups of Caucasian, Central Asian, and East and Southeast Asian origin
Summary
Given the prevalence of migration processes and integration challenges faced by various receiving societies in today’s world, attitudes toward newcomers have become an increasingly topical issue. The implicit assumption underlying such an approach is that the same theoretical mechanisms work in the cases of all immigrant groups This might not necessarily be true, as shown by the recently growing body of research that acknowledges the existence of differences in the attitudes toward different immigrant groups and in the mechanisms underlying them (Brader, Valentino, and Suhay 2008; Ford 2011; Ford and Mellon 2020; Gorodzeisky and Semyonov 2019; Hainmueller and Hopkins 2015; Harell et al 2012; Konitzer et al 2019; Raijman, Hochman, Davidov 2021; Ruedin 2020; Tartakovsky and Walsh 2020; Timberlake et al 2015; Turper et al 2015; Valentino, Brader, and Jardina 2013). Perceived competitive threat constitutes a core mechanism explaining exclusionary attitudes toward out-groups in the literature on attitudes toward immigrants (Raijman, Hochman, and Davidov 2021; Ruedin 2020; Schoon and Anderson 2017) Given that it is one of the four inherent elements underlying prejudice according to Blumer’s group position model, we make it a key element of our theoretical framework and, as a result, of our considerations. We formulate more specific research hypotheses further in the paper
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