The role of European and national identity and threat perceptions in attitudes towards immigrants

ABSTRACT

Identification with a superordinate entity, like Europe, reduces prejudice towards immigrants in general, but no research so far investigated if this differs between prejudice towards immigrants from inside and outside Europe. Using online survey data from four European countries, we determined whether national and European identification are (differently) related to attitudes towards immigrants from inside and outside Europe, and to which extent these relations can be explained by differences in refugee threat perceptions. We found that those who strongly identify with Europe hold more favorable views towards both European and non-European immigrants, while the reverse effect is found for strong national identifiers – an effect that can be explained by realistic and symbolic refugee threat perceptions. We did not find evidence for our expectation that the strength of the associations of national identification on attitudes and threat perceptions would depend on the level of European identification of participants. Overall, our findings provide mixed support for the Common In-group Identity Model because European identifiers, although more positive towards immigrants, did not make strong distinctions between European and non-European immigrants.

KEYWORDS:

• Common ingroup identity model
• European identity
• national identity
• outgroup attitudes
• refugee threat perceptions

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by funding from the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO), as part of the framework programme BRAIN-be (Belgian Research Action Through Interdisciplinary Networks), through the contract number BR/165/A4/IM²MEDIATE, and from the KU Leuven Research Council within the framework of the C2-research project FRIENDS with project number 3H170314.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. For more information about the dataset, please see De Coninck, d’Haenens, and Joris (2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Belspo [BR/165/A4/IM²MEDIATE]; Onderzoeksraad, KU Leuven [3H170314].