Regional Multidimensional Attitudes Towards Immigration: Evidence from the European Social Survey Using Small Area Estimation

Abstract

The present article is the first empirical investigation of attitudes towards immigration in Europe via small area estimation providing reliable regional estimates across European regions. Four dimensions of regional attitudes are considered, i.e., restrictive attitudes towards specific groups, restrictive attitudes towards acquired criteria, threat, and restrictive attitudes towards ascribed criteria. We produce maps of these, as well as validation outputs, demonstrating that our estimates are reliable, hence, have a strong potential in informing policy makers. We show that, although there is a large between-country variation of these attitudes, there are also large spatial differences between-region in some countries. Overall, Swedish public attitudes tend to be quite homogeneous across regions, and located towards the positive side, whereas Eastern European countries tend to show negative attitudes across all the dimensions apart from the acquired criteria. However, in these countries, we can see larger spatial differences across regions, especially in the ascribed criteria and attitudes towards specific groups indicator. In general, the threat dimension does not show a large between-region variability, compared to the other three dimensions.