Examining economic and cultural concerns in shaping attitudes towards immigration : A survey experiment

Abstract: Researchers have studied whether opposition to immigrants is primarily due to a perceived economic threat, a perceived cultural threat, or combination of the two. There are various competing theories on why people perceive immigrants as a threat but in this thesis, we will focus on testing group threat theory and social identity theory. This thesis features a survey experiment with 361 participants, recruited through an announcement with the link to the study distributed on various groups on Facebook. A 2 x 2 between-subjects design aimed to measure the impact of exposure to frames based on group threat theory and social identity theory. Our survey experiment randomly assigned participants to three treatment conditions and one baseline condition. Participants in the baseline condition read a text about vitamin D while those in the treatment groups were asked to read a fictitious opinion piece (vignette) exposing them to either the group threat frame or the social identity frame or both frames. After the frame, all subjects completed the same survey on opinions regarding immigration. We find no significant evidence that group threat framing and/or social identity framing has an effect on negative attitudes toward immigrants. Moreover, we find no relationship between immigration perceived as a relevant issue and our treatment conditions. However, politically “right” males over 50 experience negative feelings towards immigration to a higher degree and are more likely to believe that Sweden should not allow immigrants to come and live here. This study contributes to understanding framing effects on immigration. However, because of rapid policy changes on immigration at the global level and conducting the experiment in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, there are limitations to the study. Future research should expand on the findings in this report with cross-national comparison, by using people from other socio-cultural backgrounds and a change in methodology from a reading task featuring a fictitious text to a ranking of hypothetical profiles.