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⁴ These estimates come from the United Kingdom Statistics Authority (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/ [accessed 26 September 2008]) and the U.S. Census Bureau (www.census.gov [accessed 17 March 2008]), respectively.

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⁶ These results come from Gallup’s monthly telephone surveys.

⁷ The first of these results comes from a MORI survey while the second comes from the British administration of the Eurobarometer. Both were accessed through Polling the Nations.

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¹³ Bowyer, Benjamin T., ‘Local Context and Extreme Right Support in England: The British National Party in the 2002 and 2003 Local Elections’, Electoral Studies, 27 (2008), 611–620CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dancygier, ‘The Politics of Race and Immigration in Britain’; Dancygier, Immigration and Conflict in Europe; and Husbands, Racial Exclusionism and the City.

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³³ Empirical analyses in this vein typically focus on the nation as the threatened unit, but there are arguments that emphasize local identity as well. See especially Horton, John, The Politics of Diversity: Immigration, Resistance, and Change in Monterey Park, California (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

³⁴ Citrin et al., ‘Public Opinion towards Immigration Reform’; Higham, Strangers in the Land; and Citrin et al. ‘American Identity and the Politics of Ethnic Change’.

³⁵ Sides and Citrin, ‘European Opinion about Immigration,’; Fetzer, ‘Economic Self interest or cultural marginality?’; and Sniderman et al., ‘Predisposing Factors and Situational Triggers.’ For parallel claims about African Americans in the U.S., see Kinder, Donald R. and Sanders, Lynn M., Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

³⁶ Sides and Citrin, ‘European Opinion about Immigration’, p. 501.

³⁷ Hansen, , Immigration and Citizenship in Post-war Britain, p. 210Google Scholar.

³⁸ Huntington, Samuel, Who Are We? America’s National Identity and the Challenges it Faces (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004)Google Scholar.

³⁹ Here, we define frames as conceptual frameworks that ‘define what the problem is and how to think about it’, following Kinder, Donald R., ‘Communication and Opinion’, Annual Review of Political Science, 1 (1998), 167–197CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁴² Ellen Gould, Ingrid, Sharing America’s Neighborhoods: The Prospects for Stable Racial Integration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

⁴³ Horton, The Politics of Diversity.

⁴⁴ Kinder, ‘Communication and Opinion’; and Mutz, Diana C., ‘Contextualizing Personal Experience: The Role of Mass Media’, Journal of Politics, 56 (1994), 689–714CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁴⁸ For simplicity, this analysis assumes that the salience of national politics outweighs that of sub-national politics. But the same argument applies to salient rhetoric at all levels of a political system, from state governments in the United States to the governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

⁴⁹ The notion of salience is invoked in both research on agenda-setting and political psychology, and here refers to the relative attention political elites pay to various issues in their public statements and actions.

⁵⁰ Money, Fences and Neighbors, chap. 4.

⁵¹ Solomos, John and Black, Les, Race, Politics and Social Change (New York: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar.

⁵² See Johnston et al., ‘Local Context, Retrospective Economic Evaluations, and Voting’; MacAllister et al., ‘Class Dealignment and the Neighborhood Effect’; Dustmann and Preston, ‘Attitudes to Ethnic Minorities, Ethnic Context, and Location Decisions’; and King, ‘Why Context Shouldn’t Count’.

⁵³ Hopkins, ‘Politicized Places’.

⁵⁴ Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, February 2001 ‘News Interest Survey’ and 2006 ‘Immigration Survey’. Available online at: http://people-press.org/dataarchive/ [accessed 17 February, 2008].

⁵⁵ Passel and Suro, Rise, Peak, and Decline.

⁵⁶ The International Migration Outlook confirms that annual immigrant inflows to the United States declined by 0.8 per cent from 2000 to 2006 (Paris: OECD, 2010), p. 41.

⁵⁷ Both the 2001 and 2006 Pew surveys are available for download at: http://people-press.org/dataarchive/ [accessed 4 October 2008]. For the 2006 survey, which is our focus here, the AAPOR RR1 response rate was 25.2 per cent.

⁵⁸ See www.bls.gov [accessed 9 November 2008].

⁵⁹ USA Today coverage of immigration also correlates highly with coverage on television channels such as Fox News (Pearson’s correlation of 0.73) and CBS News (Pearson’s correlation of 0.69), making it an effective metric of media attention overall.

⁶⁰ The possibility that these groups might respond to neighbouring immigrants in very different ways led to 196 respondents born outside the United States, 103 US-born Hispanics and 14 US-born Asian Americans being removed. The results are not sensitive to this choice.

⁶¹ Currently, the ACS samples many but not all US localities.

⁶² King, Gary et al. , ‘Analyzing Incomplete Political Science Data: An Alternative Algorithm for Multiple Imputation’, American Political Science Review, 95 (2001), 49–69Google Scholar.

⁶³ For example, 10 per cent of respondents fail to provide their income. In total, 41 per cent of the respondents would be lost to listwise deletion.

⁶⁴ The median US county had 250,000 residents as of 2000, making these large contextual units. By contrast, the median ZIP code had just 22,300 residents.

⁶⁵ Frey, William H., Diversity Spreads Out: Metropolitan Shifts in Hispanic, Asian, and Black Populations Since 2000 (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2006)Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Fischer, ‘The Relative Importance of Income and Race in Determining Residential Outcomes in U.S. Urban Areas, 1970–2000’.

⁶⁷ Analysing the question about the most important problem facing the community yields substantively similar results despite the reduced variation in response categories.

⁶⁸ Partisanship is indicated by a seven-category partisan identification question. Income is the respondent’s total annual family income.

⁶⁹ Appendix available at: www.danhopkins.org.

⁷⁰ They are similarly robust when conditioning on the respondent’s answer to the question, ‘most recent immigrants do or do not learn English within a reasonable amount of time’, which is related to conceptions of cultural threat.

⁷¹ Hewitt, Roger, White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Solomos and Back, Race, Politics, and Social Change; Solomos, Race and Racism in Britain; and Husbands, Racial Exclusionism and the City.

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⁷⁴ The AAPOR RR1 response rate for the first wave was 60.5 per cent. Of those interviewed in the pre-election wave, the post-election RR1 response rate was 87.6 per cent.

⁷⁵ Specifically, it reflects the number of articles in a sample of roughly 100 British newspapers available through Lexis-Nexis.

⁷⁶ See Kavanagh, Dennis and Butler, David, The British General Election of 2005 (New York: Macmillan, 2005)Google Scholar; and Whiteley, Paul, Stewart, Marianne C., Sanders, David and Clarke, Harold D., ‘The Issue Agenda and Voting in 2005’, in Pippa Norris and Christopher Wlezien, eds, Britain Votes 2005 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 146–161Google Scholar. Elite attention to immigration also briefly spiked prior to the pre-election interviews, but since we capture that increased attention in our baseline survey, it does not invalidate inferences about changing the contextual influence.

⁷⁷ Gould, Philip, ‘Labour’s Political Strategy’, in Dominic Wring, Jane Gren, Roger Mortimore, and Simon Atkinson, eds, Political Communications: The General Election Campaign of 2005 (New York: Macmillan, 2007)Google Scholar, and Kavanagh and Butler, The British General Election of 2005.

⁷⁸ Kavanagh and Butler, The British General Election of 2005.

⁷⁹ The Economist, How Immigration Played (14 May 2005); http://www.icmresearch.co.uk [accessed 18 September 2009].

⁸⁰ Johnston, Ron and Harris, Rich, ‘Neighbourhood Data to be used with the 2005 British Election Study, 2006’. Available online at: http://www.essex.ac.uk/bes/ [accessed 17 March 2008]Google Scholar.

⁸¹ The respondent’s educational level was measured by sorting 18 qualifications/degrees into 8 ordered categories. The results reported below are robust to including each of the categories as indicator variables as well.

⁸² Contextual data for low levels of aggregation are not available for respondents living in Scotland.

⁸³ Very similar substantive results appear when we restrict the analysis to fully observed respondents.

⁸⁴ Table 4 in the online Appendix contains the full fitted model.

⁸⁵ Zaller, John R., The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁶ Specifically, this figure is created using the two logistic regression models, one fitted to the pre-election data and the second fitted to the post-election data. In each case, we simulate 10,000 sets of coefficients from their estimated joint distribution to account for model-based uncertainty. With these coefficients, we can then simulate the influence of shifting the local context from its 10th percentile to its 90th percentile while holding other variables constant. This procedure yields simulated changes in the probability of naming immigration as the most important problem. The distributions in Figure 5 deviate from the normal distribution both because of the simulation and because they reflect changes in bounded probabilities.

⁸⁷ Specifically, these additional robustness tests included the percentage with no qualifications, the percentage in the lowest socio-economic group, the percentage of first-time voters, the percentage without children, the percentage in poor health, the percentage working part-time, the percentage of full-time students, the percentage in professional/managerial positions, the percentage in skilled trades, the percentage in agriculture, the percentage in manufacturing, the percentage of households with a lone pensioner, the percentage of households with fewer than one person per room, the percentage of households with no central heating, the percentage of households without a car, and the percentage of the economically active in highly paid professions. The percentage non-white is very highly correlated with the percentage born outside Britain (0.87), meaning that we cannot distinguish empirically between ethnic differences and immigrant/native differences.

⁸⁸ Given the recent research by Bowyer demonstrating that the presence of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis produces ‘threat’ most consistently, it is worth noting that in these data, both the percentage South Asian and the percentage black are independent, positive predictors of indicating that immigration is Britain’s most important problem. The coefficient for the percentage black is significant (with a t statistic of 2.13) while the coefficient for the percentage South Asian is not (t = 1.35). The same groups do not always drive contextual effects, it seems. See Bowyer, ‘Local Context and Extreme Right Support in England’, and Bowyer, ‘The Determinants of Whites’ Racial Attitudes in England’ for related work.

⁸⁹ The Economist, How Immigration Played.

⁹⁰ Van Heerde, Jennifer, ‘Political Communication: Party Advertising in the General Elections’, in Dominic Wring, Jane Green, Roger Mortimore and Simon Atkinson, eds, Political Communications: The General Election Campaign of 2005 (New York: Macmillan, 2007), 65–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁹² The measure of competitiveness is a Herfindahl index of vote concentration among Labour, the Conservative Party, and the Labour party.

⁹³ Newspaper content might vary across papers, and especially across papers with different party affiliations. We are thus also interested in whether reading particular newspapers interacts with one’s local context. Deacon et al. provide a listing of newspapers by partisanship: Deacon, David, Wring, Dominic and Golding, Peter, ‘The “Take a Break Campaign?”: National Print Media Reporting of the Election’, in Dominic Wring, Jane Green, Roger Mortimore and Simon Atkinson, eds, Political Communications: The General Election Campaign of 2005 (New York: Macmillan, 2007)Google Scholar. The average post-election contextual effect for those who read papers supporting the Conservatives is 10.5 percentage points, while for other respondents it is 4.8 percentage points. The p-value for the one-sided test that the effect is smaller among readers of Tory-leaning papers is 0.058. However, we do not see a strong interaction between the respondent’s own party loyalties and the post-election contextual effect. Nor do we see an interaction between the respondent’s education level and the neighbourhood effect. To the extent that the Conservative-leaning papers were more likely to emphasize immigration issues, these findings are yet more evidence for the ‘politicized places’ approach. How one responds to local experiences depends on the frames that connect those experiences to politics.

⁹⁴ In a similar vein, one might wonder if the effects of living near foreign-born residents are especially pronounced in economically deprived areas, a possibility suggested by theories of realistic group conflict. Yet in fact, separate models detect no strong interaction between the proportion of foreign born and variables including the local percentage unemployed, the percentage in routine jobs, or the percentage with no qualifications. Put differently, respondents are not more concerned about immigration in places where their neighbours are especially economically vulnerable.

⁹⁵ See Page, Benjamin I. and Shapiro, Robert Y., The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans’ Policy Preferences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion; and Iyengar and Kinder, News That Matters.

⁹⁶ See Kinder, ‘Communication and Opinion’; and Mutz, ‘Contextualizing Personal Experience’.

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