Abstract
AbstractThe political debate over the inclusion of refugees frequently revolves around cultural differences, in particular differences pertaining to values, which are suspected to hamper social integration. Sociological accounts of values in principle warrant the assumption that different values promote conflict over sensitive social issues. However, only little is known about the actual values of refugees who recently arrived in many European countries. Comparative values research suggests that immigrants from culturally distant countries increase value heterogeneity. In contrast, acculturation and assimilation theories argue that values are not static constructs, but subject to change and transformation. Using data from the IAB‐BAMF‐SOEP survey, a representative panel of refugees in Germany, and from the World Values Survey, the present study investigates differences in liberal democratic and gender equality values between refugees and German citizens. Results indicate that refugees from almost all countries investigated show higher levels of agreement to these values, except secularism, than Germans.
Highlights
Since 2013, increasing numbers of refugees, predominantly from the Middle East and Northern Africa, have stirred ongoing debate over immigration and integration policies in the European Union
Data for the present study stem from two sources, the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees (Socio-Economic Panel, 2019), a recently established prospective panel study of refugees who arrived and filed an asylum application in Germany between January 2013 and January 2016, and the sixth wave of the German World Values Survey (WVS) which is based on a representative sample of the German population (Inglehart et al, 2014)
The IAB-BAMF-SOEP survey is a joint initiative by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) and the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and carried out by the independent research institute KANTAR Public Social Research
Summary
Since 2013, increasing numbers of refugees, predominantly from the Middle East and Northern Africa, have stirred ongoing debate over immigration and integration policies in the European Union. The comparative values literature lend support to the conjecture that immigrants and refugees from predominantly Muslim and economically less developed countries, differ notably in liberal democratic, secular and gender equality values compared to population averages in Western industrialized countries These studies typically aggregate individual-level measures to country averages, having little interest in controlling for individual-level predictors of value orientations, rather focusing on national level correlations (which typically cannot be extended to the individual level). This argument may hold for refugees who have recently fled to Germany, since they have been shown to be a selective group of their origin countries’ population, for instance with regard to age, gender and education (BAMF, 2017) Taken together, these theoretical perspectives and empirical findings suggest that country-level differences in values most likely do not translate unambiguously to immigrant populations and that existing value differences are subject to more or less rapid processes of adaptation. The present study provides a detailed analysis of differences in liberal democratic, secular and gender equality values by combining data from a representative survey amongst refugees who have arrived in Germany since 2013 and a representative sample of the German population
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