Public Opinion toward Asylum Seekers in Post-Communist Europe: A Comparative Perspective

ABSTRACT

The study examines public attitudes toward asylum seekers in seven post-communist countries—Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Slovenia—from a cross-national comparative perspective. Based on the 2016 European Social Survey, the findings reveal that the level of exclusionary attitudes toward asylum seekers in post-communist Europe is higher than that in Western Europe, although it varies meaningfully across post-communist countries. The study considers cross-country variance in the exclusionary attitudes in light of countries’ structural characteristics, including ethno-cultural composition of local populations. Individual-level analysis examines divides in the exclusionary attitudes along socio-economic, ethnic, and religious lines within the native-born populations.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The asylum-seeker population, although part of the general migrant population, is a distinct group of migrants with unique characteristics. They are forced migrants whose lives are in danger in their country of origin. States’ decisions whether to admit or expel asylum seekers are bounded to a certain extent by international agreements (such as the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol).

2. Although interesting, the existing cross-country comparative data do not allow us to examine differences in public attitudes toward these two groups of refugees.

3. Utilizing the advantages of representative observational survey data, the present study focuses on the exclusionary attitudes’ predictors, which can be measured as structural country-level characteristics and as demographic and socio-economic individual-level characteristics. To examine humanitarian concerns as a predictor of attitudes toward asylum seekers, the study would need to include attitudinal predictors. This latter approach has inherent causal direction problems; it is hard to know whether humanitarian concerns affect attitudes toward an out-group or vice versa. Therefore, such an approach is better suited to research based on an experimental surveys design.

4. Within the social distance approaches to mapping social hierarchy, the cultural marginality position can be viewed as a generalized disadvantage that is routinely reproduced through social interaction due to “the indivisible influence of economic, cultural and social resources on everyday social life” (Bottero and Prandy 2003, 194).

5. For the supplementary analysis in the section titled “East versus West,” additional data were used from all Western European countries that participated in the 2016 European Social Survey and from all countries that participated in the 2018 European Social Survey. The analysis was restricted to the native-born population aged 18 and above.

6. The box plot displays median (middle line), first quartile (low line), third quartile (upper line), and inner fences, which include all cases (i.e., countries) and the mean value (X).

7. I also compared the level of exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants belonging to a different race/ethnic group (from the majority of a country’s population) between 12 post-communist CEE countries and 17 Western European countries using the 2018 European Social Survey. Unfortunately, the 2018 ESS did not include a question on attitudes toward asylum seekers. This supplementary analysis allows us to substantially increase the number of post-communist countries in the East–West comparison. Although it does not measure attitudes toward asylum seekers as a particular group, it still provides an additional indication of the level of exclusionary attitudes toward foreigners in the post-communist European region. The results of the analysis (presented in Appendix B) reveal the same pattern that was found regarding attitudes toward asylum seekers. The level of exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants belonging to a different race/ethnic group (from the majority of a country’s population) is more widespread among post-communist CEE countries than among Western European countries.

8. To control for differences in the demographic and socio-economic composition of the native-born populations while comparing attitudes across countries, I estimated a linear regression model for the pooled sample (seven countries altogether) to predict exclusionary attitudes as a function of relevant demographic and socio-economic characteristics of respondents and a series of dummy variables representing countries (full results of the model are presented in Appendix C). In column 2 (Table 1), I present the predicted scores of the exclusionary attitudes (based on the regression equation) for a person with averaged characteristics in the pooled sample for each country. To test whether the difference between each pair of countries is statistically significant, I changed the category of comparison in a series of dummy variables representing countries in the regression model.

9. I use the relative size of the foreign (non-citizen) population, but not the relative size of the foreign-born population, because the latter provides distorted population parameters related to international immigrants in the case of five out of seven of the countries under study. The definition of foreign-born population, as provided by major cross-national data sets, includes also “historically internal migrants” in Czechia, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Russia—in other words, those who did not cross an international border at the time of their migration but migrated within a single state. Examples include individuals who migrated to Estonia, Lithuania, and Russia from other Soviet republics before the collapse of the USSR, or those who migrated to Czechia from Slovakia during the existence of Czechoslovakia, or those who migrated to Slovenia from other Yugoslav republics during the existense of Yugoslavia (see Gorodzeisky and Leykin 2021 for a detailed discussion of the issue).

10. The start of Vietnamese migration to Czechia could be traced back to the latter’s Communist past (Hokovský and Janda 2013).

11. Note that, in Czechia, 80 percent of the native-born population does not belong to any religious denomination.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation [948/20].