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Caught in the crossfire: unravelling the complex interplay of exploitation and agency in children associated with Boko Haram
Boko Haram has increasingly dominated media headlines over the past decade, particularly for its widespread recruitment and exploitation of children through forceful tactics. The group’s notorious 2014 abduction of the Chibok girls was a...
Abstract
Recent studies have demonstrated generational differences in attitudes towards immigration, however, less is known about what are the exact factors behind these differences. Our study investigates why cohorts formulate distinct patterns in attitudes towards immigration through a collective process of political socialization during their formative years. The theoretical arguments are tested using hierarchical age-period-cohort modelling across thirteen cohorts in thirteen European countries using micro attitudinal data (2002–2020) integrated with historical macro-political data. We find that contextual exposure to the principle of equality in the formative political climate is central to the formulation of a person’s attitudes towards immigration later in life. While the prevalence of the principle of equality affects immigration attitudes in adulthood positively, the principle of tradition does not. The findings imply that even subtle and cyclical shifts in national politics affect the political orientations of those undergoing the process of political socialization.
Introduction
The issue of immigration divides generations, prompting scholarly discussions about how these differentiations emerge. Earlier studies have shown that older people are more likely to express concerns about immigration or hold negative attitudes about immigrants than younger people (Mayda 2006; Quillian 1995). Instead, some suggest that differences in attitudes across age groups are due to an ideological shift between younger and older generations (Wilkes and Corrigall-Brown 2011). Recent research has empirically demonstrated that age-specific patterns regarding immigration attitudes are due to a person’s year of birth, rather than his or her biological age (Calahorrano 2013; Gorodzeisky and Semyonov 2018; McLaren and Paterson 2019; Schotte and Winkler 2018; Ford 2011). The reasons for this are not immediately apparent, as the trend from one cohort to the next is non-linear and fluctuates (Gorodzeisky and Semyonov 2018). For example, Schmidt (2021) finds that while cohort replacement has led to a substantially more positive opinion toward immigrants since the 2000s, younger generations born between 1982 and 1991 are more concerned about immigration than the older ones. Moreover, patterns of attitudes towards immigration amongst young cohorts differ across country contexts (Munck et al. 2018). In other words, it is not simply a matter of older generations being more against immigration than younger generations. Instead, it appears that age cohorts, individuals born around the same time, experience a unique set of common circumstances constituting a shared political socialization that somehow has a long-lasting impact on their attitudes towards immigration.
The term ‘political socialization’ connotes a process of adaptation that involves the perpetuation of principles, ideals, and norms from one generation to the next. While a typical setting for this occurs in the family, the national political environment also matters. Young people are exposed to normative ideals and principles via the “political tenor” of the larger society (Levin 1961). The role of the political climate in socialization is not a new idea—yet surprisingly little effort has been made to understand the content and contours of its influence. Establishing this is not immediately apparent since “the differences between the political environments are not always dramatically large: adjacent cohorts may not have experienced sets of political events substantially different in their central political meaning” (Cutler 1976, p. 189). In our view, cohort differentiation in political behaviour does not necessarily require sharp discontinuities in the political environment, such as landmark events or regime change, which have previously drawn the attention of scholars. Without dismissing the impact of landmark events on cohorts’ attitudes, we argue that socialization can also proceed through the “fits and starts” (Sears and Valentino 1997, p. 46) as political values ebb and flow between electoral cycles.
In this article, we examine the role of the political climate during formative years as an overlooked reason as to why differences in attitudes towards immigration emerge across cohorts and persist later in adulthood. By political climate, we refer to the prevalence of certain principles, norms, and ideas in the polity and party elites at a given point in time. Existing research on the formation of attitudes towards immigration or ethnic minorities tends to focus on how social climates, such as the family (Dinas and Fouka 2018; Miklikowska 2016), peers (Aboud and Amato 2008), or school (Lancee and Sarrasin 2015; Thomsen and Olsen 2017) act as socializing agents. Our aim here is not to deny the role of these already established micro- and meso-level contexts as socializing agents. We appeal to the notion that individuals are subject to simultaneous contexts of influence during their socialization.Footnote1
We theorize that discontinuities in the prevailing principles of equality and tradition during a person’s formative political climate impinge on their attitudes towards immigration as adults. From this, we derive hypotheses that we test using historical political data from the Manifesto Project Dataset that we integrate with contemporary micro-data on attitudes towards immigration from the European Social Survey (2002–2020) across thirteen cohorts in thirteen European countries. To model the potential effect of the political climate during the respondents’ formative years, we conduct a hierarchical age-period-cohort analysis with synthetic age cohorts. Our research design allows us to compare attitudes to immigration between cohorts socialized during the years 1949–2018.
Our contribution to the scholarly literature is twofold. Firstly, with notable exceptions (Grasso et al. 2019; Smets and Neundorf 2014), the political climate of the larger society—that is the country as a whole—during a person’s youth has been an understudied aspect of the political socialization process. By focusing on early socialization, we contribute by theorizing how the political climate of a person’s formative years becomes an important antecedent to their attitudes towards immigration later in life. Secondly, we also make a contribution to the scholarly understanding of attitudes towards immigration. We do so by empirically demonstrating what factors contribute to the formation of immigration attitudes during a person’s youth and how these produce systematic differentiation between cohorts. While earlier studies have noted a pattern (for instance Ford (2011) in Britain), the reasons for it are not well understood and the topic is still in its infancy.