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ABSTRACT
This research empirically approaches symbolic boundary making in the form of individual assent to selective immigration policy. Distinguishing two such types of boundaries, restriction based on immigrant skills and race/religion, we approach the antecedents of such preferences. Do economic or rather cultural concerns about immigration drive boundary making? We furthermore assess whether social boundaries in the form of integration and multicultural policies are of importance. The results obtained from the European Social Survey show that on the individual level, both forms of boundary making are mainly driven by cultural concerns. On the country level, net of several measures of diversity, integration policies dampen skill-related boundaries, while multicultural policies weaken the strength of cultural boundary making along race and religion. These findings expose the political embeddedness of processes of symbolic boundary making into the very policies that approach the respective type of boundary.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. In fact, as one anonymous Reviewer pointed out, if both types of policies continue to converge empirically as appears to be the case now, the correlation between these indices may grow strong enough that analyses like ours may not be technically possible anymore for the countries presently covered by these indices.
2. The items are ‘How interested would you say you are in politics’, ‘How often does politics seem so complicated that you can't really understand what is going on?’, ‘Do you think that you could take an active role in a group involved with political issues?’, ‘How difficult or easy do you find it to make your mind up about political issues’, and ‘Politicians in general care what people like respondent think’, ‘Would you say that politicians are just interested in getting people's votes rather than in people's opinions?’ and trust in politicians and the country's parliament. Exploratory principal components analysis using Promax rotation reveals one component for internal and one for external efficacy.
5. Luxemburg and Israel are excluded from the analyses below for reasons of macro-level data availability.
6. We again use Promax rotation.
7. The question battery used for this construct includes additional items, but we had to exclude them because they either were not available for all countries or they did not load onto the same factor in each country.
8. Put differently, as one Reviewer suggested, a low prevalence of immigration and the resulting homogeneity may facilitate the formation and maintenance of strong ethno-racial boundaries.
9. Note that the effect by a close margin misses significance when a dummy for Sweden is added, but it is significant at the 5% level once an additional dummy for Norway is added. Moreover, there are several other countries that balance Sweden's influence in a similar fashion, which shows that the relationship is not spurious. Since this dependent variable exhibits some skewness, we rerun the models displayed using a natural-log-transformed version of this variable. There are only minor changes in the results: ‘Very difficult with present income’ and ‘Immigrants take jobs away’ turn significant. The squared age term is not significant anymore. On the country level the effect of non-western immigrant share now is significant when the welfare typology is controlled. Otherwise the findings in and are substantially the same.
10. For instance, an equal overall relevance of economic and social concerns about immigration emerges when we rerun our models while substituting variables corresponding to those used by Bridges and Mateut (Citation2014) for our measures of boundary making.