Intergroup contact and its right-wing ideological constraint

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper extends previous intergroup contact research by examining how face-to-face interaction relates to opposition to immigration across the mass-level ideological divide. Opposition to immigration refers to calls for restrictive immigration policies. Analyses show: a) that intergroup contact is associated with less opposition to immigration and b) that political ideology moderates this association. More specifically, rightists do not generalise their positive contact experiences to the same extent as leftists. Right-wing ideological values clearly constrain the outcomes of intergroup contact, suggesting that contact situations involve active value and belief defense. Additional robustness analyses also show that the moderating role of political ideology is stronger in superficial contact settings than in intimate arrangements involving friendship. The ideologically-constrained intergroup contact hypothesis is tested using a fixed-effects regression analysis of the 2014-European Social Survey (Round 7), which includes 21 countries and 32,196 individuals. The concluding section discusses the broader implications of our findings.