Threats and Norms: Multicultural Policies and Natives’ Attitudes Towards Immigrants

ABSTRACT

Do multicultural policies affect natives’ attitudes toward immigrants? I investigate whether cross-country differences and within-country changes in multicultural policies are associated with natives’ negative attitudes toward immigrants and to whom the effects are noticeable. The results of multilevel longitudinal analysis indicate that neither cross-country differences nor within-country changes in multicultural policies are directly relevant to natives’ negative attitudes toward immigrants. However, cross-country differences in multicultural policies are negatively associated with the gap in negative attitudes between natives on the political right and left, while within-country changes in multicultural policies are positively associated with negative attitudes among socioeconomically vulnerable people.

KEYWORDS:

• Multicultural policies
• attitudes toward immigrants
• European countries
• the group threat theory

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Gong Shun, James Laurence, and Moshe Semyonov for their helpful comments on this paper. I am also grateful to anonymous reviewers and editors of the Sociological Quarterly. I take full responsibility for all infelicities and errors of judgment or interpretation.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I presented studies using the Multicultural Policy Index, discrimination, or citizenship policies, which are categorized as subfields of multicultural policies.

2. Citrin, Levy, and Wright (2014) found that multicultural policies exacerbate the association between anti-immigrant attitudes and hostile feelings toward the political system, and Hooghe and de Vroome (2015) found that multicultural policies and education interact to influence anti-immigrant attitudes.

3. Although a cross-country study conducted by Koopmans (2010) showed that multiculturalism combined with welfare policies decrease immigrants’ employability, differences in immigrants’ unemployment rates are not considerably large. In addition, his design does not distinguish influences of multiculturalism and welfare policies. On the other hand, as I showed, multiple studies have shown immigrants’ successful economic integration under multicultural policies.

4. Notably, the initial motivations of Breugelmans, van De Vijver, and Schalk-Soekar (2009) and van de Vijver and colleagues (2008) were to evaluate the effects of a terrorism event (i.e., murder of Theo van Gogh) on Dutch public opinion. However, during the period addressed in these studies, drastic changes occurred in Dutch multicultural policies, but these studies show that public opinion remained stable. Thus, based on these studies, I can argue that Dutch people do not change their attitudes due to changes in multicultural policies.

5. The sample size of the country-years is sufficient in terms of power (Fairbrother 2014). In addition, I should note that waves 1 and 2 for France are dropped because the variable of satisfaction of income is not provided for these waves.

6. I conducted an additional test excluding those who categorize themselves as an ethnic minority. I successfully replicated the results presented in Table 1.

7. In the analysis presented in Table 1, satisfaction with income was treated as a continuous variable. However, treating it as a categorial variable does not change the results; along with satisfaction with income, coefficients gradually increased.

8. The plot shows that even the tolerance of multicultural policies declined (i.e., less than 0 on the x-axis), and citizens with unsatisfied income continue to have negative attitudes toward immigrants, but the level of negativity is not as strong compared with that under situations in which multicultural policies become more positive and tolerant.

9. The interaction terms for political ideology and cross-country multicultural policies are B(SE)= –.010 (.004), and those for satisfaction of income and within-country multicultural policies are B(SE)= –.015 (.006).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Akira Igarashi

Akira Igarashi is Assistant Professor in the Center for Statistics and Information at Rikkyo University, Japan. He studies institutional and environmental influences on prejudice towards immigrants and immigrants' identifications.