This article scrutinizes the theoretically proposed positive sides of different forms of civic national attachment. Data come from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 1995, which is a programme for cross-country comparative attitude studies. Two different forms of attachment and their relationships to xenophobia have been examined, namely national identity and national pride. In order to dismiss possible country-specific phenomena, four Western countries, Australia, Germany, Britain and Sweden were studied. The choice of countries was based on the different policy regimes implemented in the areas of citizenship and immigration, which illustrate how the nation-state is conceptualized in the different countries. The results show that both civic national identity and national pride go together with xenophobia, whereas the reverse holds for ethnic national identity and national pride in all four countries, despite their different conceptualizations of the nation-state. In all, the article gives empirical support for the proposed theoretical argument of a separation of the civic and ethnic in society.
In this article, I set out to test a specific case of group threat theory, namely the size of the minority population. My general aim is to test whether the proportion of immigrants in Swedish municipalities has any effect on anti-immigrant attitudes. More specifically, I examine whether visibility of immigrants matters, via country of origin, as well as whether different contexts intensify the relation between size of the minority population and anti-immigrant attitudes. I conclude that the proportion of the foreign-born population has no effect on anti-immigrant attitudes, whereas people have fewer anti-immigrant attitudes in municipalities with a high proportion of the most visible groups of immigrants. A recent influx of immigrants to the municipality does not matter for levels of anti-immigrant attitudes. However, the economic context matters in that anti-immigrant attitudes of people are strongest in poor municipalities with a large share of immigrants. The political context, on the other hand, does not matter.
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