Abstract
Attitudes toward immigration have attracted much scholarly interest and fuelled extensive empirical research in recent years. Many different hypotheses have been proposed to explain individual and contextual differences in attitudes towards immigration. However, it has become difficult to align all of the evidence that the literature has produce so far. The present article contributes to the systematization of political science empirical research on public attitudes toward immigration in the last decade. Using a simplified combined-tests technique, this paper identifies the micro- as well as macro-level factors that are consistently linked to attitudes toward immigration. It reports findings from a meta-analysis of the determinants of general attitudes toward immigration in published articles in thirty highly ranked peer-reviewed political science journals for the years 2009–2019. The results warrant a summary of factors affecting attitudes to immigration in a systematic, measurable and rigorous manner.
Highlights
Attitudes to immigration, immigrants and refugees have become a highly salient issue in many countries, in the aftermath of the so-called “migration crisis”
This article aims at assessing recent empirical evidence on what individual and contextual level factors are consistently linked with general attitudes to immigration and which are not
I make a contribution to the literature by (a) providing a systematic overview of factors linked to individual-level attitudes toward immigration in the political science literature and (b) evaluating which of these factors were consistently found to explain individual-level attitudes toward immigration in empirical research
Summary
Terms of access and reuse for this work are governed by the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CCBY 4.0) International license. If cited or quoted, reference should be made to the full name of the author(s), editor(s), the title, the working paper series and number, the year and the publisher. ISSN 1028-3625
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