Marketization and anti-immigrant attitudes in cross-national perspective

Abstract

This study builds upon an evolving research agenda by assessing the utility of three predictors of anti-immigrant attitudes: a “marketized mentality,” its aggregated level analogue – a “marketized anomic culture,” and an institutional imbalance characterized by the dominance of the economy over other social institutions. Drawing upon Institutional Anomie Theory (IAT), a macro-sociological theory originally advanced to explain crime, previous research has reported that persons who strongly embrace market-based values are prone to be prejudiced to legitimize the exclusion of groups that do not conform to the priorities of market society. Moreover, IAT identifies economic dominance in the institutional order as a macro-structural property that is also potentially relevant to understanding anti-immigrant attitudes. This study extends prior efforts by examining the relationships between the theorized predictors and anti-immigrant attitudes in a multilevel framework with data collected from the World Values Survey and international organizations.