Regional identity and support for restrictive attitudes on immigration. Evidence from a household population survey in Ghent (Belgium)

ABSTRACT

It has been argued that supporting a restrictive view on the inclusion of immigrants finds its origin in a localized feeling of group identity. We test this hypothesis with a household survey in the Belgian city of Ghent (n = 3735). The results show that local and national identities are salient, but also that regional, European, and cosmopolitan identities are supported simultaneously. Especially the regional, Flemish identity is strongly associated with a restrictive, ethnic attitude toward new groups in society. A European identity was not significantly associated with this restrictive attitude. Our conclusion is that not just the geographical scale of group identity is important in explaining anti-immigrant sentiments. The specific historical connotations of every geographical level should be considered. A comparison between generations, i.e. parents and their late adolescent children, suggests that this association between specific group identities and ethnic citizenship norms is equally present among younger cohorts.

KEYWORDS:

• Regional identity
• local identity
• Belgium
• Ghent Study
• common ingroup identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While some studies distinguish a cultural concept of citizenship (Rijerse et al. 2013; Verkuyten and Martinovic 2015), in this questionnaire we replicated the module that is used since 2002 in the European Social Survey, and that has proven to be remarkably robust (Reeskens and Hooghe 2010).

2 As a robustness check, we have also included the same analysis, but based on the two items (correlation .50). This additional analysis (Online appendix C) confirms the analysis based on the single item.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by FWO (Belgium).