The ‘intergroup paradox’ in Andalusia (Spain): an explanatory model

ABSTRACT

The widely renowned theory of group-threat predicts anti-immigrant backlash when immigration societies experience economic downturns. However, despite skyrocketing unemployment and widespread misgivings about immigration’s impact, no discernible wave of anti-immigrant sentiment has emerged in Spain; the ensuing puzzle accentuates in the southernmost region of Andalusia, where jobless rates surged beyond 35%. This study examines why anti-immigrant animosity remained stable at low levels, even receded, amidst such inauspicious conditions. Our explanatory model expects increasingly adverse pressures of perceived group-threat on natives’ sentiment toward immigrants to be compensated by increasingly benign impact of various benevolent predispositions and situational perceptions. To test these assumptions, we compute a repeated logistic regression model, discern coefficient from sample effects and examine time-trends among vulnerable populations; data were collected at the crisis’ onset (2008) and nadir (2013). Defying expectations, neither perceived group-threat nor principled pro-immigration credos (Universalism; pro-diversity) were found to affect the evolution of anti-immigrant sentiment appreciably throughout the economic downturn; however, ideological polarisation and elite-bashing yielded increasingly benign impact. These findings suggest that intergroup tensions were kept latent by a dynamics of political competition that has side-lined immigration as salient social issue: the prevalence of anti-austerity, anti-corruption political rhetoric contributed to pre-empting anti-immigrant sentiment.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-immigrant sentiment
• group-threat
• economic crisis
• political competition
• Spain

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Sebastian Rinken http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7951-8501

Notes

1 The OPIA study (‘Opiniones y actitudes de la población andaluza ante la inmigración’) explores the views of Andalusia's Spanish-national residents concerning immigration from less-developed countries. From 2005 through 2013, the Institute for Advanced Social Studies (IESA), a unit of Spain's Research Council (CSIC), conducted five OPIA editions on behalf of Andalusia's Migration Observatory (OPAM); we use data from the second and fifth wave here. Original samples comprise 4120 (2008) and 2402 (2013) CATI interviews; to discard naturalized immigrants, samples used here exclude foreign-born Spaniards, amounting to N = 4065 (2008) and N = 2363 (2013) observations respectively. See Sections 2 and 4 for details on item trajectories and data set.

2 http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/table.do?tab=table&plugin=1&language=en&pcode=tgs00010.

3 Cf. EPA, Spain's Labour Market Survey (www.ine.es).

4 To avert misunderstandings: we do not assume out-group animosity in times of hardship to be an anthropological constant.

5 Table 3 also reports overall significance levels for predictors with more than two categories (namely, age-group, educational attainment, social class and political ideology).

6 An initial model comprising only socio-demographic predictors (gender, age-group, educational attainment, habitat and class) renders a significant reduction of animosity-odds for men in 2013, and stronger effect of educational attainment; other results are similar to the full model.

7 Spain’s Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (www.cis.es) and the European Commission (http://ec.europa.eu/COMMFrontOffice/PublicOpinion/) provide monthly and bi-annual data on issue salience, respectively. In Spain and some other Mediterranean countries, the refugee crisis increased immigration’s salience for Europe, but barely affected its prominence as problem for ‘our country’.

8 Cf. The Economist, September 3rd 2016, page 29.

9 www.juntadeandalucia.es/justiciaeinterior/opam/?q=estudio_OPIA.