Solidarity with refugees across Europe. A comparative analysis of public support for helping forced migrants¹

1 Supplemental data for this article can be accessed http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2019.1616794.

ABSTRACT

The major influx of refugees to Europe, especially in 2015, has led to immense solidarity, but also hostility among European citizens. In the wake of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ country differences in the willingness to help displaced people have become a salient issue of European integration. In this paper, we explain country differences in the public support for helping refugees across Europe at a critical time-point – spring 2016 – just after the influx of displaced people had peaked. Theoretically, we base our explanation of country differences on economic threat, inter-group contact, welfare state, and political framing theories. Using data from a Eurobarometer survey across the 28 EU member states, we show that solidarity with refugees varies significantly between countries. Controlling for individual characteristics of respondents and utilizing a multilevel design, we find that solidarity with refugees is highest in countries with an extensive welfare state and a historically high share of immigrants, whereas there is no effect of countries’ economic situation or strength of right-wing parties. On the individual level of respondents, however, we find that people with a more precarious economic background, little institutional trust, and a right-wing political orientation express lower solidarity with refugees.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• crisis
• solidarity
• attitudes
• cross-national comparison
• migration

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers as well as the editor Michalis Lianos for their valuable comments. Moreover, we would like to thank participants of the brown bag seminar at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz, for their helpful input, specifically Carlo Koos and Christina Zuber.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sebastian Koos is an assistant professor of corporate social responsibility at the University of Konstanz. He works on corporate social responsibility, political consumerism, industrial relations, solidarity and pro-social behavior. His research has been published in two books and multiple journals, such as Acta Sociologica, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Policy and Society or Socio-Economic Review.

Verena Seibel is an assistant professor at the University of Groningen. Her academic interests include structural and social integration of immigrants, immigrants and the welfare state, and gender. So far, she has published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, and the Children and Youth Services Review.

ORCID

Sebastian Koos http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6739-1649

Notes

1 Supplemental data for this article can be accessed http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2019.1616794.

2 In additional models, we use the Muslim population share in each country as a robustness check, which provides consistent results (see Appendix).

3 We use Döring's and Manow's classification of right-wing parties. Other classifications with different cut-off points on the left-right scale provide consistent results. In addition, we have also used the vote share of those parties and again found similar effects.

4 Using the original scaling of the dependent variable and ordered logit multilevel models we find highly consistent results, both in terms of statistical significance, as well as in effect size. The main difference is that we find being female to have a statistically significant positive effect in the ordered logit models.

5 Bivariate results, i.e. using only one macro-level measure at a time, can be found in the Appendix.

6 Additional multilevel ordered logit models, using the original variable scale, provide highly consistent results.

7 In additional models (not reported), we tested whether the effects of the subjective individual perceptions of the own or the country's economic situation is systematically linked to the objective economic situation of the country, but did not find any support.