Political Trust and Support for Immigration in the American Mass Public

Abstract

Immigration is one of the most salient and important issues in contemporary American politics. While a great deal is known about how cultural attitudes and economics influence public opinion toward immigration, little is known about how attitudes toward government influence support for immigration. Using cross-sectional data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), panel data from the ANES and General Social Survey, as well a Mechanical Turk (MTurk) survey experiment, I show that political trust exerts a positive and substantively meaningful influence on Americans' support for immigration. Politically trustful individuals, both Democrats and Republicans, are more supportive of pro-immigration policies. These findings underscore the political relevance of trust in government and show that public attitudes toward immigration are not driven solely by feelings about immigrant groups, partisanship, core political values, nor personality traits, but are also affected by trust in government, the actor most responsible for managing immigration policy.

Trust and the Coronavirus Pandemic: What are the Consequences of and for Trust? An Early Review of the Literature

“…Given trust is known to have consequences for vote choice, policy preferences (such as on redistribution and immigration) and other political behaviour (e.g. Hooghe and Dassonneville, 2018; Jacobs and Matthews, 2012; Macdonald, 2020), it is important to understand how the pandemic has impacted trust. Are increases in trust permanent, or how quickly do they dissipate?…”

Does Political Trust Matter? A Meta-analysis on the Consequences of Trust

“…The literature is to a large extent reliant on increasingly-large survey data, where the effect of trust is calculated controlling for confounders that are observed contemporaneously. Some research is moving to experimental methods (e.g D 'Attoma, 2020;Fairbrother, 2019;Macdonald, 2020;Peyton, 2020), and this is encouraged in tandem with correlational work. In addition to this, the literature could utilise panel datasets in which the same individuals (or aggregates) are measured over time and use both instantaneous and lagged trust variables as predictors.…”

Immigration Politics and Policymaking in the USA (2017–2021): Examining the Effect of Geopolitics on Public Attitude Towards Immigration Policies

“…Politics, for long, has been considered as an important factor in shaping public opinion about immigration and immigration-related policies (MacDonald, 2021 ). For example, it has been widely argued that ideological preferences of political parties as well as party affiliation of people play a critical role in public support.…”