How a history of migration affects individuals’ political attitudes

ABSTRACT

Migration has become an important and polarising issue on the political agenda, in particular since the migration movements to Europe in 2015. What attitudes migrants bring to the host societies is relevant for the stability of modern democracies in general and for political representation in particular. Several studies investigate differences in attitudes and preferences between migrants and non-migrants, on the one side, and within the heterogeneous group of migrants on the other. These (differences in) attitudes among migrants are often related to the dominant patterns of political attitudes in the countries of origin. We contribute new insights to this literature using novel survey data from Germany covering subsamples of respondents with an Italian, Russian and Turkish migrant background. We argue and show empirically that migrants’ positions on contentious issues like migration, the order of society, and welfare state policy are shaped not only by the cultural background of the migrant’s society of origin, but also by personal characteristics like the status of a first- or second-generation migrant and their religious orientation in terms of denomination and religiosity.

KEYWORDS:

• Migrant background
• Germany
• first-generation migrants
• political attitudes

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 For a more extensive overview of the political history of Russian-Germans, see Goerres, Mayer, and Spies (2020).

2 Please note that fourrespondents without a migrant background (‘none’ in the Figure) were born outside Germany, e.g. because their parents worked in a foreign country when the respective respondent was born. As their parents are Germans, we do not consider these respondents as individuals with a migrant background.

3 We provide a detailed overview on the exact wording of the questions in the online appendix. Note that we rescaled the data to a range from 0 to 10.

4 We refrain from interpreting the responses from individuals with other migrant backgrounds than the ones we study here since this is a very heterogeneous group of migrants, which makes a reasonable interpretation of the findings difficult.

5 Figure 2 indicates that the general sample is somewhat left-leaning when it comes to societal and migration issues. To provide some face-validity, we present respondents’ party placements on the same issues in the online appendix. The placements provide evidence that respondents have understood the dimensions and scales correctly.

Additional information

Funding

The findings presented in this paper are produced as part of the DeZIM project ‘Social Conflicts and Dynamics of Party Competition in Migration and Integration Policy.’ We acknowledge funding by the German Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ); funding reference number: 3920405INZ.