Immigration, national identity and political trust in European democracies

ABSTRACT

This article argues that discrepancies between individual-level conceptualisations of national identity and official government approaches to national identity, as reflected in policies towards migrants, contribute to reduced levels of political trust in Europe. Public opinion data matched with contextual data measuring immigrant incorporation policies are used to investigate this proposition. The findings indicate that individuals who take a more exclusive approach to national identity but live in political systems that are comparatively more welcoming of immigrant incorporation into the national political system tend to be the least trusting of their political systems, and this is closely followed by those individuals who adopt a more inclusive form of identity but live in countries that are relatively less welcoming in their treatment of immigrants. Where individual identity and immigrant incorporation are both inclusive, trust tends to be relatively high.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• trust
• national identity
• public opinion

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of the article have been presented at the 22nd International Political Science Association World Congress, Madrid, July 8–12 2012, the Immigration Studies Initiative, College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas, Austin, 5 September 2012, the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester, UK, 24 October 2012, and the General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research, 26–29 August 2015, Montreal. The author thanks participants at these conferences and seminars, as well as others who have read the article, for their many invaluable comments. This includes Peter Achterberg, Sarah Birch, Jennifer Fitzgerald, Marc Hooghe, Phil Lynch, Sophie Marien, Mike Medeiros, Laura Morales, Sergi Pardos-Prado, and Rick Whitaker. Any errors are the sole responsibility of the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The conceptualisation of political trust is the subject of a large body of academic research. Due to space limitations, the conceptualisation of ‘political trust’ or political system support is not reviewed here; for discussions of these concepts, see Levi and Stoker (2000), the essays in Braithwaite and Levi (1998), Miller and Listhaug (1990, 1999) and Weatherford (1992), to name a few. Political trust is conceptualised in this article as ‘a summary judgment that the system is responsive and will do what is right even in the absence of constant scrutiny’ (Miller and Listhaug 1990, 358).

2. Some may contend that the relationships outlined here are also connected to the mobilising activities of far-right parties. I have investigated the relationships shown below, controlling for the presence of a popular far-right party, including interacting this variable with emphasis on exclusive national identity, and with emphasis on inclusive national identity. The results indicated that far-right parties did not appear to be mobilising particular kinds of national identity to affect political trust one way or another and that when government migrant policy is also included in the model, any potential far-right effect is not statistically significant. That is, it appears to be government policy rather than the far-right that is most relevant, though I acknowledge that far-right parties are likely to be playing a role in the design of government policies towards immigrants (directly or indirectly).

I have also investigated the effects of several other potential country-level control variables, including the World Bank’s governance scores, immigration levels and economic variables such as unemployment and GDP/capita, and none of these affected the relationships described below. Due to limited degrees of freedom at the country level the focus here is on the key country-level contextual variable, government migrant policy.

3. Comments received by the author regarding whether or not to include the EVS results have been extremely conflicting; given the degree of potential overlap between the most clearly civic EVS item – respect for laws and political institutions – and the dependent variable – trust in political institutions – I have decided to omit these results.

4. I have also investigated the relationships shown below without the respondents who said ‘don’t know’, and there were only minor differences in the y-intercepts but almost no differences in the strength of relationships reported below.

5. I acknowledge that particularly at the country level, civic national identity may be exclusive to the extent that in many countries, citizenship is a requirement for participation and is difficult to obtain. At the individual level, though, I contend that the civic understanding of national identity as conceptualised here is relatively more inclusive than emphasising factors over which the individual has no control whatsoever (e.g. parentage and amount of time spent in the country).

6. There is disagreement within academic literature regarding whether civic and ethnic identity are actually distinct from one another. Wright, Citrin and Wand contend that ‘whether an individual is ascriptive or civic minded in their conceptualization of national identity … can be conceived of as a continuum, but it is generally thought that there is a meaningful dichotomy of outlooks that it is important to capture’ (2012, 476). While research based on ISSP data finds civic and ethnic identity to be relatively strongly correlated, Wright, Citrin, and Wand (2012) convincingly show that this may be an artefact of the approach to measuring national identity used in the ISSP, and that a ranking approach better captures the distinctiveness of civic and ethnic/ascriptive identity. Though the measure of national identity used here is not exactly a ranking measure, it does require respondents to consider their priorities when it comes to national identity and is the closest cross-national survey to use the ranking measure that Wright, Citrin, and Wand (2012) advocate.

7. Heath, Martin, and Spreckelsen’s (2009) analysis of ISSP data indicates potentially significant cross-national differences in the type of national identity each of the ISSP items is capturing, with some items failing to load onto the ‘correct’ factor in some countries. The most problematical cases in their study are countries that are not included in the analysis here (USA, Israel, Chile, Poland and the Czech Republic). These authors do identify some problematical items for countries that are included in the analyses here, but in almost all cases, these refer to survey items that are not used here. For instance Heath et al find that the religion item is problematical in Portugal and that in Ireland the language item loads negatively onto the ethnic identity factor. I do not use either of these items, and Heath et al.’s analysis would seem to provide additional justification for not using these items in cross-national analyses like the ones conducted in this article.

The most problematical case in the Heath et al results for the analyses conducted in this article would seem to be Spain, where items such as birthplace, living in the country all of one’s life, and respecting the institutions and laws of the country tend to load onto the same factor, with ancestry loading far more weakly onto this same (first) factor but also showing some connection to a second factor. The analysis conducted by Wright, Citrin, and Wand (2012) for the U.S. points us to the potential conclusion that the results for Spain could be an artefact of the measurement of national identity in the ISSP, in that the ratings method used in the ISSP may not always adequately capture the distinctiveness of ethnic and civic identity. For the case of Spain, I have investigated the relationship between the national identity scale and the dependent variable, political trust, to see if the relationship between these is substantially different than in other countries included in the analysis and found that – as would have been expected based on existing analyses (Berg and Hjerm 2010; McLaren 2015) – greater emphasis on civic identity is associated with higher political trust. I have also reanalysed the multilevel results with Spain omitted, and the relationships reported here are similar to those that exclude Spain.

As one final robustness check on the measure of national identity, I have reanalysed the Eurobarometer data focusing on one of the key items I have used to measure the ethnic side of the scale – birthplace – which loads onto the ethnic identification scale in every ISSP country from Heath et al. which is also included in my analysis. That is, I have reanalysed the relationships investigated in the article using the birthplace item as the sole measure of emphasis on ethnic identification and using the participating in politics item as the sole measure of civic identity. The results still show a significant interactive effect between migrant policy and national identity, as is the case with the results reported below.

8. Preliminary analyses also investigated the effects of emphasis on culture, language and religion separately and found these to have very limited effects on political trust. Given this information and the cross-national variability in the connection of these items to civic versus ethnic identity reported in note 7, analysis of emphasis on these items has been omitted from this article.

9. Also of relevance is that there appear to be cross-national differences in the extent to which certain survey items measure civic and ethnic identity especially in some of the newer democracies of Central and Eastern Europe (see note 7).

10. The analysis here uses the 2007 MIPEX because it comes prior to the fieldwork for the individual-level data.

11. The 2010 MPI and 2007 MIPEX are even more strongly correlated, at 0.67.

12. Questions may be raised about whether regions that are known to hold regional identities, such as Catalonia, the Basque Country, Scotland, Wales and the regions of Belgium have any impact on the results here. I have investigated the results shown in Table 2 with dummy variables included for these regions, and this had very little impact on the coefficients shown in the table. None of these dummy variables was statistically significant, except for Catalonia, where – interestingly – people in Catalonia, on average, had more positive perceptions of the Spanish political system than excluded regions.

I also re-ran the analysis in Table 2 for those respondents in the above mentioned regions (N = 1233) and found that the coefficients for the characteristics of national identity emphasised were not statistically significant in these models.

I then re-ran the analysis omitting Belgium from the model and found that an emphasis on ascriptive characteristics was associated with more negative perceptions of the political system, as is the case for the pooled sample used in the main analyses here. Though a full-scale regional analysis is beyond the scope of this article, this is clearly an area for exploration in future research.

13. The results reported in Table 2 are from a fixed effects model. I have investigated a random effects model in which the slopes for national identity are allowed to vary. The results indicate that the slopes do indeed vary significantly across countries (p = .005). Examining the coefficients for the model that includes random slopes, however, it appears that the overall conclusion that would be drawn from this model is similar to that for the fixed effects model. As there are very limited degrees of freedom at Level 2 and the need to estimate a further parameter to account for random slopes reduces these degrees of freedom, I report the fixed effects model here. The random effects model is reported in Supplemental Material Table 4.

14. Robustness checks are outlined in the Supplemental Material.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was partly funded by British Academy Research Development Award [grant number 52926].