The effect of perceived cultural and material threats on ethnic preferences in immigration attitudes

Abstract

This paper shows that cultural and material threats exist side by side serving different psychological functions and that they manifest in differential attitudes towards immigrants from different ethnic or racial origins. While culturally threatened individuals prefer immigrants akin to themselves as opposed to those from different races and cultures the materially threatened prefer immigrants who are different from themselves who can be expected not to compete for the same resources. We test our hypotheses using multilevel structural equation modelling based on data from twenty countries in the 2002 wave of the European Social Survey. The disaggregation of these two types of perceived threat reveals responsiveness to the race of immigrants that is otherwise masked by pooling the two threat dimensions.