Cosmopolitan Immigration Attitudes in Large European Cities: Contextual or Compositional Effects?

Abstract

Europe is geographically divided on the issue of immigration. Large cities are the home of Cosmopolitan Europe, where immigration is viewed positively. Outside the large cities—and especially in the countryside—is Nationalist Europe, where immigration is a threat. This divide is well documented and much discussed, but there has been scant research on why people in large cities are more likely to have favorable opinions about immigration. Debates about geographic differences generally highlight two explanations: contextual or compositional effects. I evaluate the two with data from the European Social Survey, the Swiss Household Panel, and the German Socio-Economic Panel. Results support compositional effects and highlight the importance of (demographic and cultural) mechanisms that sort pro-immigration people into large cities. This has several implications for our understanding of societal divisions in Europe; most notably that geographic polarization is a second-order manifestation of deeper (demographic and cultural) divides.

Gendered Places: The Dimensions of Local Gender Norms across the United States

“…From this perspective, commuting zones have distinct gender norms due to demographic differences in the types of people who reside there. A second explanation asserts that areas' norms are maintained through contextual effects (Johnston and Pattie 2006;Maxwell 2019).…”

European Union Citizenship and the sorting of Europe

“…However, he made use of two insights: that if movement between places is easy enough, people will tend to move to places matching their preferences, and that if enough people do this it will create a sorting effect, as those with similar preferences cluster together. Those insights are more generally applicable, including to contexts where clustering is partial or imperfect, and they have been widely applied: they are used in theories of regulatory competition (Bernholz and Vaubel 2007), and to explain political clustering in the US (Bishop and Cushing 2008;McDonald 2011) and they are applied to urban-rural polarization within states (Maxwell 2019). While most of these applications are far removed from Tiebout's rigorous economics, as is this article, any discussion of how the following of preferences leads to clustering of the like-minded has to begin by crediting his work.…”

“…In encouraging transnational movement, primarily to cities, it helps weaken the link between those cities and their state. The cosmopolitan class becomes less a part of a national context, and more a branch of a transnational phenomenon, more likely to recognize and identify with their peers in other European cities (Maxwell 2019;Favell and Recchi 2019;Kuhn, Solaz, and van Elsas 2018). 1 At the same time, EU rules on budgets, state aid, and the de facto market internal pressure to privatize public institutions may limit some of the redistributive tools that Member States use to combat domestic fragmentation.…”

What are Europeans’ views on migrant integration?

“…There is evidence that policy performance influences public attitudes towards these same policies (Van Oorschot and Meuleman, 2012 [55]). Indeed, the disconnect between declared policy objectives and outcomes, and the negative impact this has on public opinions, is one of the premises of 'gap hypothesis' long formulated in migration studies (Martin, Orrenius and Hollifield, 2014 [56]).…”

“…For a full descriptive analysis of the survey, please see the report by the European Commission (European Commission, 2018[2]). 17 For a comparative overview, see Martin, Orrenius and Hollifield (2014[56]). …”