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While radical right parties championing anti-immigrant platforms have made electoral gains throughout Europe, anti-immigrant sentiment—a key indicator of radical right support—has not dramatically increased during this same period. In this article, we seek to help make sense of this paradox by incorporating a contextual factor missing from previous studies: levels of anti-immigrant violence. Our key argument is that higher levels of collective violence targeting immigrants raise the salience of the immigrant/native boundary, which activates both positive and negative views of immigrants and makes these attitudes more cognitively accessible and politically relevant. This argument implies that exposure to violence against immigrants should strengthen existing prejudice (or empathy) toward immigrants and engender feelings of affinity (or antipathy) for radical right parties. Analyses of the German portion of the European Social Survey (ESS 2014 − 2019) and the Anti-Refugee Violence in Germany (ARVIG 2014 − 2017) datasets reveal a powerful interaction effect: exposure to higher levels of collective violence increased the probability of feeling closest to radical right parties among those who held neutral, negative, and extremely negative views of immigrants. However, these events were not associated with radical right sympathies among those holding pro-immigrant attitudes. We conclude that when violence against immigrants resonates with public opinion on immigrants, it opens new political opportunities for radical right parties. These findings should inform future research on the politicization of international migration, especially studies investigating how anti-immigrant attitudes translate into political outcomes.

Our reply to Bonikowski and DiMaggio (2021) is in three parts. First, we clarify the aim of our research note (Eger & Hjerm, 2021). Our original critique was based on a replication of their inductive analysis, and we evaluated their work using best practices for the methodology that they chose. Our argument is straightforward: If one is going to use inductive methods to say something meaningful about the real world, one needs to make sure that the model being advanced fits the data. We present additional evidence supporting our original critique. Second, we discuss whether their new analyses bolster their original results and conclusions. Third, because their own results actually suggest that different levels of American nationalism exist rather than qualitatively different types, we question their claim of convergent validity. In short, we stand by our original critique.

According to the progressive's dilemma, diversity and solidarity are not easily combined, and this tension poses a political challenge for left-wing parties that embrace both. In this chapter, we measure the relationship among different configurations of immigration-welfare attitudes and support for political parties and candidates (far right, center-right, center-left, and far left). We focus on Sweden, Germany, and the United States—three major immigrant destinations that are also often regarded as the as the prototypical social democratic, conservative, and liberal welfare states. Using pooled cross-sectional data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and General Social Survey (GSS), we find that attitudes consistent with the progressive's dilemma have long existed. Results from multinomial logistic regression models reveal that anything but the most progressive attitudes make support for left-wing parties unlikely. Yet longitudinal trends suggest that the progressive's dilemma, while certainly a challenge for the political left, is not insurmountable.

Scholarship, including seminal research on prejudice, identifies adolescence as a critical period for the development of attitudes. Yet most sociological research on prejudice, especially in the form of anti-immigrant sentiment, focuses on the relationship between contemporaneous social conditions and attitudes towards out-groups while neglecting the demographic context during one’s impressionable years. Therefore, we design research to investigate the relationship among temporally distal and temporally proximal sub-national contexts and native-born attitudes towards immigration and immigrants. To do this, we merge geocoded data from the General Social Survey (1994–2016) with a unique US state-level dataset (1900–2015). Results from multilevel models reveal that immigrant presence during adolescence is a more consistent predictor of attitudes towards immigration and immigrants in adulthood. Thus, while the majority of sociological research on anti-immigrant sentiment asks ifsocietal conditions matter, our results suggest that a more important question is when the context matters.

Previous empirical research on tolerance suffers from a number of shortcomings, the most serious being the conceptual and operational conflation of (in)tolerance and prejudice. We design research to remedy this. First, we contribute to the literature by advancing research that distinguishes analytically between the two phenomena. We conceptualize tolerance as a value orientation towards difference. This definition—which is abstract and does not capture attitudes towards specific out-groups, ideas, or behaviors—allows for the analysis of tolerance within and between societies. Second, we improve the measurement of tolerance by developing survey items that are consistent with this conceptualization. We administer two surveys, one national (Sweden) and one cross-national (Australia, Denmark, Great Britain, Sweden, and the United States). Results from structural equation models show that tolerance is best understood as a three-dimensional concept, which includes acceptance of, respect for, and appreciation of difference. Analyses show that measures of tolerance have metric invariance across countries, and additional tests demonstrate convergent and discriminant validity. We also assess tolerance’s relationship to prejudice and find that only an appreciation of difference has the potential to reduce prejudice. We conclude that it is not only possible to measure tolerance in a way that is distinct from prejudice but also necessary if we are to understand the causes and consequences of tolerance.

In this chapter, I test the backlash hypothesis by investigating the relationship between objective levels of globalization and elite articulation of political issues in European national elections between 1970 and 2017. To do this, I rely on data from the Manifesto Project and the KOF Swiss Economic Institute. Results indicate that globalization itself does not make these politics inevitable.

This chapter investigates whether the so-called 'migration crisis' of 2015 is associated with a change in welfare nationalist attitudes across 19 European countries. The chapter asks first whether the highly visible 'migration crisis' is associated with a shift in the levels of welfare nationalist attitudes among Europeans. In a technical sense, the 'crisis' is treated as a natural experiment that allows us to investigate how a salient event affects popular attitudes towards granting social rights to immigrants. Does welfare nationalism increase or decrease, or do attitudes become more polarized? The chapter then goes on to investigate whether certain contextual changes, such as the political salience of the immigration issue, the presence of inclusive immigrant integration policies, the proportion of foreign-born and asylum seekers in the population, and economic conditions help to explain within-country changes in support for the inclusion or exclusion of 'newcomers'.

In this article, we investigate the ideology of the populist radical right (PRR) and the extent to which its political message has changed over time. In doing so, we also judge the usefulness of the PRR-tag. Like seminal scholarship on these parties, we contend that both economic and social positions are relevant for contemporary radical right parties. Further, we argue that contemporary parties’ stances are indicative of a nationalist ideology. Using the Manifesto Project Dataset, we investigate radical right policy preferences between 1970 and 2015. Results indicate that right-wing economic stances are more prevalent prior to the twenty-first century and that radical right parties increasingly make economically leftist claims. Results also demonstrate that radical right parties are not always the farthest to right in national political spaces. Further, we show that contemporary parties make nationalist claims. Indeed, nationalism not only increasingly characterizes these parties but also increasingly distinguishes them from other major party families, whose average positions over time are globalist. We argue that contemporary radical right parties are better conceptualized and described as neo-nationalist, a label consistent with both their social and economic positions.

Background: Previous studies have consistently identified an association between higher levels of education and lower levels of anti-immigrant sentiment, but the underlying reasons for this relationship remain unclear. Therefore, this research aims to help explain why education matters for attitudes toward immigrants. This thesis consists of two studies, where in I examine the role of two features of education, specifically the aquistition of knowledge and social relationships.

In the first study, I analyze how two aspects of teaching in schools are associated with anti-immigrant sentiment. I examine education as a means to knowledge by investigating whether the content of education, such as critical thinking and multicultural education, is inversely related to students' prejudice. I also look into the certification of teachers and whether this has a similar effect.

In the second study, I investigate the school as an arena for social interaction and examine the relationship between outgroup contact and prejudiced attitudes. Previous research has found that outgroup contact, especially contact in the form of outgroup friendship, is effective in reducing prejudice. Based on these previous findings, I study how the Secondary Transfer Effect (STE) of friendship with a specific outgroup member is associated with attitudes towards other ethnic or racial groups.

Method: The two studies rely on a cross-sectional survey of Swedish high school students (aged 16-18) administered by 'Forum för levande historia' (Forum for living history) and Statistics Sweden during the 2009-2010 academic year. Additionally, survey participants' responses are matched to registry data. This thesis also uses multilevel (MLM) and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models.

Results: Results show that both aspects of education are correlated with lower levels of anti-immigrant sentiment. The first study, in which education is a means to knowledge, demonstrates that education focused on critical thinking and multiculturalism are negatively correlated with anti-immigrant sentiment. Furthermore, results show that more exposure to teachings about xenophobia and racism is associated with less prejudice. However, when controlling for exposure to critical thinking, as well as learning about religions and cultures, the results show that exposure to learning about xenophobia and racism are no longer significant. Moreover, there is a negative association between exposure to teachers with a teaching certification or teaching degree and prejudice.

Results from the second study, in which the school functions as an arena for social interaction, shows that positive attitudes associated with intergroup friendship not only generalize to the ethnic outgroup of that friend but, more importantly, also to other secondary outgroups. STEs are most frequently found where boundaries between ingroups and outgroups are perceived to be the thickest. Thus, the presence of STEs appears to be group-specific. Previous research on perceived social distance in Sweden and other countries help shed light on these findings.

In summary, the results of this thesis provide evidence of two different complimentary accounts of the negative relationship between education and prejudice.