Attitudes to immigration, immigrants and refugees have become a highly salient issue in many countries, particularly in the aftermath of the so-called “migration crisis”. While increasing proportions of immigrants in Western societies are viewed positively by some, stressing immigration benefits, others view these demographic changes with suspicion. Consequently, social scientists and, in particular, political scientists, have dedicated considerable attention to the factors that might explain individual attitudes toward immigration in recent years. However, as many hypotheses and factors have been proposed, ranging from intergroup contact and residential context to the role of personal predispositions, it has become increasingly difficult to see the wood for the trees.

Disagreement over what drives people’s attitudes to immigration persists. The literature on public opinion toward immigration predominantly focuses on two main types of factors affecting these attitudes. The first factor is individual-level indicators such as age, gender, education, left-right positioning, etc. The second approach is to look at macro-level indicators such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, the share of the population that is unemployed, or the share of immigrants in the country. This article aims at assessing recent empirical evidence on what individual and contextual level factors are consistently linked with general attitudes to immigration and which are not. I make a contribution to the literature by (a) providing a systematic overview of factors linked to individual-level attitudes toward immigration in the political science literature and (b) evaluating which of these factors were consistently found to explain individual-level attitudes toward immigration in empirical research.

Several publications (Ceobanu and Escandell, 2010, Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2014, Dinesen and Hjorth, 2020) have already provided comprehensive reviews regarding factors affecting attitudes to immigration. While these reviews have many merits, this article intends to advance previous work in several ways. Firstly, the above-mentioned studies are mostly concerned with attitudes to immigration policy in North America and Western Europe (Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2014) or they limit their review to studies that make use of multinational survey projects (Ceobanu & Escandell, 2010). In contrast, this article assesses general attitudes regarding the effect of immigration, without limiting its scope geographically and also including single country studies. For instance, data from Central and Eastern Europe are also included, as well as those from New Zealand. Secondly, given recent developments in many countries around the world, epitomized by Donald Trump’s victory in the American presidential election in 2016 and the Brexit vote, empirical research regarding attitudes to immigration has unprecedently flourished in recent years. Therefore, new data have been released (new waves of cross-country longitudinal datasets such as European Social Survey (ESS), European Values Study (EVS) and the World Values Survey (WVS)). New theories (see for example Pardos-Prado and Xena (2019)) theory regarding individuals with low transferable skills in the labour market articulating a subjective sense of job insecurity and consequently higher hostility toward migrants) and new hypotheses (see for example Aarøe, Petersen, & Arceneaux’s (2017)) proposition of individuals high in behavioural immune sensitivity being more opposed to immigration) have been also proposed. Thirdly, I propose a more advanced technique to assess the determinants of attitudes to immigration compared to the systematic narrative reviews available so far (Ceobanu and Escandell, 2010, Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2014, Dinesen and Hjorth, 2020). I advance a quantitative (meta-analytical) procedure used to systematically and statistically combine the results of previous studies regarding each factor that is consistently linked to attitudes to immigration.

Recently, there have also been meta-analyses concerning attitudes to immigration (Pottie-Sherman and Wilkes, 2017, Kaufmann and Goodwin, 2018). Nevertheless, their focus has been different. While both studies analyse attitudes to immigration as the dependent variable, they focus only on the effect of ethnic diversity (Kaufmann & Goodwin, 2018) and group size (Pottie-Sherman & Wilkes, 2017) on these attitudes. In contrast, the present meta-analysis is concerned with identifying what indicators are most frequently used in quantitative studies in top political science journals to explain individual attitudes to immigration, instead of concentrating on solely one explanatory factor. Moreover, the ultimate goal is to identify, within the political science literature, what individual and contextual indicators are consistently found to influence individual attitudes to immigration.

The analysis presented here is part of a larger project that seeks to systematize the literature on the factors affecting attitudes to immigration. In general, the determinants of attitudes to immigration are studied by several social science fields, such as political science, economics, psychology, sociology and migration studies. The reasons to focus the present meta-analysis on political science are mostly twofold. Firstly, immigration has become one of the polarizing political issues in many countries. Immigration attitudes are a salient political cleavage affecting many diverse political outcomes such as voting behaviour, social cohesion, citizenship acquisition policy and access to welfare. Thus, understanding what factors affect attitudes to immigration is directly relevant to explaining key phenomena in political science. This is reflected in the discipline´s flourishing interest in explaining these attitudes and the prominence of the topic in its top journals, while other fields such as, for example, economics consider attitudes to immigration a rather marginal topic. Admittedly, in some other social science disciplines, such as what is commonly referred to as “migration studies”, explaining differences in attitudes to immigration also plays a rather prominent role. However, migration studies are a highly specialized discipline with few outlets and published papers per year. To maintain the comparability of the quality of the journals with the other four larger disciplines, only a handful of journals could be used. Secondly, the focus of this meta-analysis on political science is determined by the dependent variable analysed. For instance, psychology mostly focuses on explaining feelings towards immigrants, sociology on individual preferences to allow more or fewer immigrants into one’s country and ethnic and migration studies on attitudes towards a specific migrant group based on country of origin, certain religion or behaviour. As I am interested in reviewing factors affecting attitudes regarding the consequences of immigration for the receiving societies, this type of immigration attitude is mostly studied by political scientists compared to a rather sporadic interest of other fields in this type of attitude. This is, nevertheless, not to say that there are articles published outside the field of political science that would not fit the established selection criteria in terms of the dependent variable. Unfortunately, this ad hoc selection of articles based on their usefulness and relevance to the present meta-analysis would be against the good practice of pre-defining the meta-analytical selection criteria a priori and thus need to be disregarded.

This article is structured in four parts. I begin by presenting the sample of quantitative studies and the research strategy. I then systematically analyse the individual factors which are most frequently used in these quantitative studies to explain attitudes to immigration. I then shift to contextual level factors at the regional and country level. Finally, I summarize my findings and discuss some possibilities for further research.

This is a part of the article by Lenka Dražanová.