Need for support or economic competition? Implicit associations with immigrants during the 2015 migrant crisis

Abstract

How did the Austrian public think about immigrants at the peak of the 2015 migrant crisis? News media and policy makers suggested a cleavage in public opinion along the lines of humanitarian support and economic competition. We empirically disentangle these groups using a Single Category Implicit Association Test (SC-IAT). The data were collected by Project Implicit as a part of an online panel survey initiated by the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES). The analyses reveal that Austrian citizens predominantly associate immigrants with the need for support. However, implicit associations also seem to vary depending on citizens' backgrounds and beliefs. The findings further indicate that implicit associations towards immigrants affect citizens' policy preferences.

The Advent of Survey Experiments in Politics and International Relations

“…Studies have contributed to capturing and disentangling the formation and explanations of attitudes towards specific groups (e.g. Gilens et al 1998; Hainmueller and Hopkins 2015; Johann and Thomas 2018; Kuklinski et al 1997), allowed insights into the definition and mechanism of corruption (Corbacho et al 2016; Oliveros and Gingerich 2020; Weitz-Shapiro and Winters 2017) or have contributed to understanding how the endorsement of policies by political actors shapes support for these policies among the public (e.g. Bush and Jamal 2015; Matanock and Garbiras-Díaz 2018).…”

“…For example, so-called Implicit Association Tests (Greenwald et al 1998) and their variants allow measuring subconscious, implicit attitudes towards specific groups or events, as opposed to explicitly asking and measuring them (see e.g. Banse et al 2001;Johann and Thomas 2018;Johann et al 2018;Ksiazkiewicz and Hedrick 2013;Schaap et al 2019). While these methods offer a wide variety of designs, it is beyond the scope of this article to elaborate on these in detail.…”

Public debate in the media matters: evidence from the European refugee crisis

“…The first is that the European refugee crisis has dominated public debate in the media for the past several years, featuring diverse and often highly polarized opinions, and empirical research has found that politicians are sensitive to this kind of coverage. At one side of the spectrum, pro-refugee news articles have tried to garner support by getting readers to sympathize with humanitarian tragedies of failed treks across the Mediterranean Sea [31,32]. At the other side, articles opposed to refugees have tended to politicize their presence-particularly that of young men-by depicting them as "problems" and "invaders" [33].…”