Over the last two decades, the American states have become increasingly active in shaping U.S. immigration policies. One consistent predictor in studies of state immigration policies revolves around public opinion or mass political attitudes in the form of anti‐immigrant sentiment. Unfortunately, past research relies extensively on blunt demographic proxies or other alternative replacements to measure mass opinion. Through incorporating a direct measure of anti‐immigrant sentiment constructed from public opinion surveys, we uncover mixed results. In static models, anti‐immigrant sentiment predicts a state’s overall immigration policy restrictiveness or policy “tone”; however, mass opinion fails to consistently predict immigration restrictiveness in more dynamic models of annual policy change and total number of hostile policies. We theorize that state legislators are likely responding to mass opinion with immigration policy restrictiveness when citizens mobilize and demand accountability during times of heightened issue salience. However, during times of reduced salience among the populace the influence of anti‐immigrant sentiment wanes, and commercial and political elites are seemingly able to shift individual immigration policies in more accommodative directions. Anti‐immigrant sentiment can motivate state immigration policy restriction, but likely only during select periods of heightened issue salience and attentive, engaged citizenry.
An estimate is provided of an innovative state-level measure of anti-immigrant sentiment for use in future policy and behavioral studies. State governments became increasingly active in adopting immigrant policies in the 2000s. Previous research highlights the role of public opinion, especially attitudes toward immigrants, in explaining policy priorities and outcomes. Unfortunately, most extant studies utilize political ideology or immigrant populations as rough proxies for public opinion. In this article, we estimate a reliable and valid measure of anti-immigrant sentiment at the state-level using survey aggregation with multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) for the period 2004 to 2008. We compare our estimates of anti-immigrant sentiment to alternative measures of immigrant presence and political ideology in predicting multiple variations of state immigrant policies. Ultimately, we find theoretical and statistical advantages of using anti-immigrant sentiment over previous measures in predicting immigrant policies.
This study examines the link between individual attitudes and voting for radical right parties in 16 European countries, using the European Social Survey (ESS). This study includes, in a single model, several different components of the radical right political platform in order to test which components are more strongly found among radical right voters. Using the initial assumption that the anti-immigrant message of radical right parties should be attractive to individuals with similar predispositions, I use the ESS to find evidence that radical right voters are attracted to these parties because of the political message of immigration attitudes and anti-democratic attitudes. Further, depending on the context, social conservatism is associated with radical right support. In sum, radical right support is based on multiple factors with immigration attitudes as the primary consideration, with populism and social conservatism playing a minor but significant role.
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