Who Should Be Given an Opportunity to Live in Slovakia? A Conjoint Experiment on Immigration Preferences

Abstract

So far, little is known about which personal attributes of immigrant applicants play a role in public preferences on who should be given an opportunity to live in Slovakia. To provide novel evidence and to test theoretical predictions of economic and socio-psychological approaches to immigration attitudes, we conducted a preregistered conjoint experiment with a sample of young Slovak adults (N = 873). We found that participants preferred younger, more educated, female, and non-Muslim applicants and to a lesser extent, applicants coming from non-Muslim majority countries. Participants’ gender and place of residence played inconclusive roles in their immigration preferences.

Keywords:

• Immigration preferences
• conjoint experiment
• Slovakia
• anti-Muslim bias
• sociotropic

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Porticus Vienna and by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under contract no. APVV-17-0596. The funding bodies were not involved in any stage of the research process.

Disclosure statement

Authors report no potential conflict of interest.

Data availability

Data, R code, materials used in this research, and preregistration protocol are available at: https://osf.io/6ga5u/?view_only=13060a63428a4dc09d737966e77c9e95

Notes

1 Preregistration is available at https://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x = ct8hd7. This preregistration also includes a protocol for a survey experiment that was part of data collection. Results of the survey experiment are reported in a separate article.

2 At present time (January 24, 2021), this legislation remains still in force.