ATTITUDES TOWARDS IMMIGRANTS IN LESS DEVELOPED COUNTRIES The Effect of Welfare Institutions

Abstract: Polls show that immigration is one of the most important issues when citizens are asked to rank different policy topics. Individual attitudes towards immigrants are important, as public opinion to some degree influences politics and policies in a country. Moreover, it is important for the integration of immigrants in a country, as they need to be employed by natives and welcomed into the social activities. Previous research on developed countries has found that more comprehensive welfare institutions lead to more positive individual attitudes towards immigrants. This study advances the literature and examines the relationship between welfare institutions and attitudes towards immigrants, in the context of less developed countries. Four mechanisms found in previous research on developed countries are in this study contextualized into a weaker institutional setting in less developed countries. In this study, two different dimensions of attitudes to immigrants are examined: the cultural and the material dimension. Using individual data from the World Values Survey including at least 39 countries the relationship between welfare institutions and attitudes towards immigrants is examined. The data is explored by using a multilevel logistic regression including controls for several relevant factors, both at the individual and country level, emphasized in previous research. The analysis shows that welfare institutions have a positive influence on citizens’ attitudes to immigrants along the material dimension, while the result for the cultural dimension is not as robust and is sensitive to the specific modeling.