Who Should Be Given an Opportunity to Live in Slovakia? A Conjoint Experiment on Immigration Preferences

Abstract

So far, little is known about which personal attributes of immigrant applicants play a role in public preferences on who should be given an opportunity to live in Slovakia. To provide novel evidence and to test theoretical predictions of economic and socio-psychological approaches to immigration attitudes, we conducted a preregistered conjoint experiment with a sample of young Slovak adults (N = 873). We found that participants preferred younger, more educated, female, and non-Muslim applicants and to a lesser extent, applicants coming from non-Muslim majority countries. Participants’ gender and place of residence played inconclusive roles in their immigration preferences.