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Value Shift: Immigration Attitudes and the Sociocultural Divide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2020

Caroline Marie Lancaster Open the ORCID record for Caroline Marie Lancaster [Opens in a new window]
Caroline Marie Lancaster*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: cml93@live.unc.edu
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Abstract

The sociocultural divide in Western Europe is increasingly focused on issues of national identity, namely immigration. It is commonly assumed that opponents of immigration also exhibit conservatism on other sociocultural issues. Yet recent research suggests that general social conservatism is declining in the region. Do immigration attitudes fit squarely into the sociocultural dimension? Using survey data from eleven West European countries, as well as a Dutch household panel from 2007–2019, this study finds that gender attitudes, a key sociocultural issue, are subject to change through both cohort and life cycle effects, while immigration attitudes are stable over the course of the panel and exhibit little variation across cohorts. Immigration attitudes also appear to be immune to period effects resulting from the 2015 refugee crisis. Further, those born during and after the ‘post-materialist revolution’ have weakened associations between these two attitudes, while older individuals' attitudes are strongly correlated. The combination of gender egalitarianism and anti-immigrant sentiment may become increasingly common as acceptance of the former spreads, while immigration remains a hotly contested issue.

Keywords

sociocultural attitudesideologyimmigration attitudesgender attitudesnationalismEuropean politics
Type
Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , January 2022 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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