Didier Ruedin
Biographic Data
| ID | 270386 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Didier Ruedin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Didier |
| FAMILY NAME | Ruedin |
| SIGNATURE | RUEDIN D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Witwatersrand |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5213-4316 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 642 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Come From Away: Internal Migration and Nativist Attitudes in Canada
Objective We examine the factors affecting attitudes and policy responses to internal migration in Canada, a decentralized federal state. Opposition to internal migration is widespread but far less studied than attitudes toward international migration. Why are some individuals opposed to the relocation of fellow citizens within their own country? Methods Using an original survey of 4052 respondents in Canada, we develop an index of internal‐migra…
Migrantization of mobile EU citizens? Assessing the impact of political reception contexts on bureaucratic discrimination
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40878-026-00536-5
‘Tell me more…’: The kind of information added influences ethnic discrimination in the Swiss rental housing market
Experimental research in many countries shows that ethnic or racial minorities are discriminated against in rental housing markets. Such discrimination may reflect an aversion to minority tenants, but can also be due to the use of stereotypical images of minorities in the absence of clear signals that minority apartment seekers are suitable tenants. Existing experimental research has struggled to distinguish these two channels. In a nationwide fi…
The Impact of Refugee Shocks on Host Countries: A Scoping Review
This article provides a systematic overview of the academic literature on the impact of ′′refugee shocks“ – the sudden arrival of large numbers of refugees – on host countries. A scoping review was conducted using Google Scholar in September 2022 to describe the literature, drawing on 4,576 effects from 123 quantitative studies with no restrictions on countries, year of publication, type of publication, or the reported topics. This broad scope ac…
When politicians feel pressure to represent: Evidence from South Africa
This article explores whether representatives from minority groups feel under pressure to represent the group they are associated with. We use a representative survey experiment in South Africa (N = 1,252), combined with semi-structured interviews with elected representatives (N = 25). In the survey, there are clear expectations in the population that groups should be represented by a member of ‘their’ group. However, in the survey experiment whi…
Migration debates in the political party arena during the Covid‐19 pandemic in Austria
The Covid‐19 pandemic highlighted the economic contribution of migrant workers in maintaining essential services and access to goods. This new perspective on migrants as essential workers raised expectations in migration studies that it could reinvigorate an inclusive setting in terms of migration debates and policies. Building on this potential, we examine migration debates in the political party arena with a focus on centrist parties. The analy…
Follow the media? News environment and public concern about immigration
Immigration is a hot topic in Europe, but research on the media effects on public attention to immigration remains limited. We examine how media coverage affects the degree of importance attached to immigration in seven Western European Union member states. Data come from an extensive analysis of claims in printed newspapers, and the Eurobarometer (2002–2009). The continuous sample of news coverage is aggregated into a biannual panel, and we rela…
When expectations backfire: Educational Differences in Declining Destination Attachment Among Recent Immigrants
Immigrants with higher levels of education tend to report more discrimination and a weaker attachment to their destination country than immigrants with lower levels of education. This so-called integration paradox may be caused by two basic, mutually independent mechanisms: highly educated immigrants (1) more often experience unmet migration expectations, and (2) show stronger negative reactions when their expectations about their life abroad are…
Towards a precise and reflexive use of migration-related terminology in quantitative research: Criticism and suggestions
To describe migration-related phenomena, we need to reflect on the terminology and choose the most adequate one that allows us to determine whether migration is the (main) cause of a phenomenon, a consequence, or even unrelated and misattributed. We argue that the use of such terminology in quantitative and experimental research is often flawed because of its differentiated adoption in legal, political, or scientific contexts. To illustrate our a…
Experimental evidence on how implicit racial bias affects risk preferences
We ask how human behavior changes when racial discrimination is costly and when choices are risky. By asking N = 4,944 participants in Germany to form a soccer team in a series of online experiments, we measure decision-making in an accessible way. Higher costs of discrimination can reduce disparities, but we show that these costs can also trigger implicit racial bias: participants who received an additional financial incentive to select more ski…
How Do People Perceive Immigrants? Relating Perceptions to Numbers
How does the general public perceive immigrants, whom do they think of when thinking about "immigrants," and to what extent are these perceptions related to the actual composition of immigrant populations? We use three representative online surveys in the United States, South Africa, and Switzerland (total N = 2,778) to extend existing work on the perception of immigrants in terms of geographic coverage and individual characteristics. We also rel…
What Is the Nexus between Migration and Mobility? A Framework to Understand the Interplay between Different Ideal Types of Human Movement
Categorising certain forms of human movement as 'migration' and others as 'mobility' has far-reaching consequences. We introduce the migration-mobility nexus as a framework for other researchers to interrogate the relationship between these two categories of human movement and explain how they shape different social representations. Our framework articulates four ideal-typical interplays between categories of migration and categories of mobility:…
A global network of scholars? The geographical concentration of institutes in migration studies and its implications
The study of international migration and responses to it has experienced rapid growth in the last three decades: an institutionalisation of migration studies. This paper identifies and specifies infrastructural and semantic elements of institutionalisation by establishing a global Directory of Migration Research Institutions identifying 282 institutes focused on migration research that were operative between 1945 and 2020. We observe a clear geog…
Migrants’ Skills Wastage in the Labor Market: A Multidisciplinary Approach for Policy Formation
Restricting Human Movement During the Covid-19 Pandemic: New Research Avenues in the Study of Mobility, Migration, and Citizenship
Every government in the world introduced restrictions to human mobility – that is, the movement of persons across and within state borders – in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Such restrictions thus constituted a global phenomenon, but they were by no means globally uniform; rather, they varied significantly between and within states, as well as over time. This research note presents different data sources for studying the drivers and outcomes…
Discrimination driven by variation in social and economic conservatism: Evidence From a Nationwide Field Experiment
We examine how contextual variation in aggregated political attitudes shapes ethnic discrimination. Using a field experiment with national coverage we identify ethnic discrimination in the Swiss housing market (N = 7,533 queries for viewings from fictitious persons who vary by name to signal ethnic origin). We use referendums and popular initiatives to identify the aggregated political attitudes at the municipality level in two dimensions: social…
How one gesture curbed ethnic discrimination
Members of ethnic and racial minorities across North America and Europe continue to face discrimination, for instance, when applying for jobs or seeking housing. Such unequal treatment can occur because societies categorize people into groups along social, cultural, or ethnic and racial lines that seemingly rationalize differential treatment. Research suggests that it may take generations for such differences to decline, if they change at all. He…
Local-to-local electoral connections for migrants: The Association Between Voting Rights in the Place of Origin and the Propensity to Vote in the Place of Residence
Published online: 12 September 2022
Responsiveness of Local Politicians to Immigrants Does Not Vary Systematically by Voting Rights
Are politicians more responsive to foreign citizens if they have the right to vote? To examine this question, we exploit regional variation in voting rights for foreign citizens in Switzerland. Our original audit experiments find no evidence that local politicians are more responsive to foreign citizens depending on whether foreign citizens have the right to vote. Another survey suggests that local politicians are not strongly motivated by reelec…
No sign of increased ethnic discrimination during a crisis: Evidence from the Covid-19 pandemic
When crises hit, social theory predicts increased hostility toward immigrants. We exploit the Covid-19 pandemic as a unique exogenous crisis and examine whether discrimination increased in its wake. Repeating a field experiment in the Swiss housing market in 2018 and 2020, we find no evidence of increased discrimination against the most important immigrant groups in Switzerland. Contrarily, when uncertainty dominates the market, proprietors appea…
Shared Nationality in Social Exchange: A Trust Vignette Experiment in the United States, South Africa, and Switzerland
Empirical research suggests that societies that are diverse as a result of international migration have lower levels of social trust, but little is known about the mechanisms underlying this relationship. The authors test one possible mechanism: that conationality increases interpersonal trust and the willingness to reciprocate trust. As part of large-scale surveys in the United States, South Africa, and Switzerland, respondents were presented wi…
The Extent of Résumé Whitening
Persistent hiring discrimination as demonstrated by correspondence experiments incites immigrant job candidates and their descendants to modify their résumé to hide their immigrant status, that is, résumé whitening. To date, we have little to no empirical evidence on how common this is in practice. We test the extent of résumé whitening with a representative survey of immigrants in Switzerland (N = 7659). Around 9% of the immigrants used some rés…
Hiring discrimination on the basis of skin colour? A correspondence test in Switzerland
With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, the situation of Black people in many Western countries has come under closer scrutiny and ethnic discrimination has been brought to the forefront. Little is known about hiring discrimination against Blacks in many European countries. In a correspondence test in the Swiss labour market, we sent fictitious paired applications by candidates of Swiss (ostensibly White) and Cameroonian descent…
The Austrian People's Party: An Anti-Immigrant Right Party
Published online: 09 February 2021
How political reception contexts shape location decisions of immigrants
Several academic fields study how immigrants choose their place of residence when moving to, or within destination countries. Existing studies, however, focus on isolated factors, and we do not know whether political factors matter once we have accounted for well-established determinants. This paper examines the extent to which political factors, such as voting rights for foreign citizens, citizenship policies and popular support for right-populi…
Ethnic discrimination in hiring decisions: A Meta-Analysis of Correspondence Tests 1990–2015
lt;p>For almost 50 years field experiments have been used to study ethnic and racial discrimination in hiring decisions, consistently reporting high rates of discrimination against minority applicants – including immigrants – irrespective of time, location, or minority groups tested. While Peter A. Riach and Judith Rich [2002. “Field Experiments of Discrimination in the Market Place.” The Economic Journal 112 (483): F480–F518] and Judith Rich [20…
Ethnic Group Representation in a Cross-National Comparison
This paper compares the levels of ethnic group representation in parliament in 95 democracies. The analyses are comparative in nature, breaking with the literature where single country studies are the norm. Considering both electoral and cultural variables, the results cast doubt on whether the role of the electoral system in shaping political representation is dominant. In contrast to what much of the literature suggests, once controlling for th…
The Gap between Public Preferences and Policies on Immigration: A Comparative Examination of the Effect of Politicisation on Policy Congruence
The existence of a gap between public preferences for more restrictive immigration policies and relatively expansive immigration policy in Western democracies has received considerable attention. Sometimes, this gap has been explained by the nature of immigration policies: dominated by elites while the public remained uninterested. In many countries, however, immigration has gained considerable salience among the public. There are competing expec…
Estimating party positions on immigration: Assessing the reliability and validity of different methods
We provide a systematic assessment of various methods to position political parties on immigration, a policy domain that does not necessarily overlap with left–right and is characterized by varying salience and issue complexity. Manual and automated coding methods drawing on 283 party manifestos are compared – manual sentence-by-sentence coding using a conventional codebook, manual coding using checklists, automated coding using Wordscores, Wordf…
How attitudes towards immigrants are shaped by residential context: The role of ethnic diversity dynamics and immigrant visibility
We examine how proportional changes in residential context are associated with changes in attitudes towards immigrants. We specifically examine ethnic diversity dynamics and immigrant visibility at the level of the neighbourhood. Following the ‘defended neighbourhood’ hypothesis, we focus on proportional change, not absolute numbers. Data from the Dutch LISS panel are analysed using fixed-effect models, measuring the composition of neighbourhoods…
Attitudes to immigrants in South Africa: Personality and Vulnerability
While many countries across the world face increasing numbers of immigrants, the literature on attitudes to foreigners and immigrants focuses on Western countries. This article tests broad insights from Western countries in a specific non-Western context – South Africa, a country marked by sporadic violence against some immigrant groups. This provides an important validity check. Data from the 2013 South African Social Attitudes Survey and the 20…
Participation in Local Elections: Why Don’t Immigrants Vote More
Why do immigrants vote less in local elections when they have the right to vote? I present a new representative survey on participation in the 2015 municipal elections in the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland, and predict electoral participation with logistic regression models. Most immigrant groups vote less than the majority population. Four explanations are tested for this difference: social origin (resources), political engagement, civic integrat…
Obtaining Party Positions on Immigration in Switzerland: Comparing Different Methods
The position of political parties on policy issues is crucial for many questions of political science, including studies of political representation. This research note examines different methods for obtaining party positions on immigration in retrospective. Party positions are obtained using pooled expert surveys, manual coding of party manifestos with a conventional codebook, manual coding of manifestos using check‐lists, and automatic coding o…
Do we need multiple questions to capture feeling threatened by immigrants
Across Europe some individuals observe immigration with unease and feel threatened by immigrants. Most relevant surveys ask about ‘immigrants’ in the generic sense, but some differentiate between specific immigrant groups. This article uses 24 questions on potential neighbours to systematically vary the characteristics of immigrants in a representative survey in Switzerland, 2013. Respondents systematically consider immigrants from distant cultur…
The positions mainstream left parties adopt on immigration: A cross-cutting cleavage
Immigration is often perceived as a political topic that overlaps traditional ideological cleavages. Much research has focused on the positions of the extreme right, and little research has examined mainstream parties and their public stances on immigration. This shortcoming hampers broader understanding of political competition on this issue. Drawing on a political claims analysis of seven countries between 1995 and 2009, we present the salience…
The Austrian People's Party: An Anti-Immigrant Right Party
Published online: 09 February 2021
A Foreigner who Does Not Steal My Job: The Role of Unemployment Risk and Values in Attitudes toward Equal Opportunities
Immigration has become systematically politicized and opposed by many individuals. We examine individual attitudes toward equal opportunities for foreigners and Swiss citizens, using cross-sectional data from the Swiss Household Panel. Individuals with low levels of education tend to oppose foreigners, while the opposition by individuals with high levels of education increases with the risk of unemployment. Values and beliefs explain the negative…
The Representation of Women in National Parliaments: A Cross-national Comparison
Women’s representation in national parliaments is examined using a large cross-national sample. Initially, the article seems to confirm previous findings that the electoral formula and quotas are good predictors for the proportion of women in parliament. In line with some recent contributions, this article finds that the proportion of women in parliament is explicable in terms of culture—particularly attitudes towards women as political leaders. …
Immigration and Integration Policy in Switzerland, 1848 to 2014
The regulation of immigration and how immigrants are treated once they settle in a country are fundamental aspects of national policy. Existing descriptions of the developments of immigration and integration policy have either provided a limited snapshot, or relied on the author's subjective assessment of how policies developed over time. In this research note, we provide a systematic and truly historical assessment of immigration and integration…
The Many Forms of Multiple Migrations: Evidence from a Sequence Analysis in Switzerland, 1998 to 2008
This article provides estimates of different kinds of contemporary migration trajectories, highlighting multiple or repeated migrations. Using sequence analysis on linked longitudinal register data, we identify different migration trajectories for three cohorts (1998, 2003, and 2008) of 315,000 immigrants in Switzerland. Multinomial regression analysis reveals the demographic characteristics associated with specific migration trajectories. We dem…
Why religion? Immigrant groups as objects of political claims on immigration and civic integration in Western Europe, 1995–2009
Increasing Validity by Recombining Existing Indices: Mipex as a Measure of Citizenship Models
Objective Researchers often reuse existing data and indices even in cases where theory demands different measures. Here, I argue that with little additional effort, it is possible to increase the validity of research by recombining individual indicators of existing indices. Methods This approach is demonstrated by using data from the widely used Migration Integration Policy Index (MIPEX), recombining some of the 148 indicators to approximate Koop…
Follow the media? News environment and public concern about immigration
Immigration is a hot topic in Europe, but research on the media effects on public attention to immigration remains limited. We examine how media coverage affects the degree of importance attached to immigration in seven Western European Union member states. Data come from an extensive analysis of claims in printed newspapers, and the Eurobarometer (2002–2009). The continuous sample of news coverage is aggregated into a biannual panel, and we rela…
A global network of scholars? The geographical concentration of institutes in migration studies and its implications
The study of international migration and responses to it has experienced rapid growth in the last three decades: an institutionalisation of migration studies. This paper identifies and specifies infrastructural and semantic elements of institutionalisation by establishing a global Directory of Migration Research Institutions identifying 282 institutes focused on migration research that were operative between 1945 and 2020. We observe a clear geog…
Hiring discrimination on the basis of skin colour? A correspondence test in Switzerland
With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, the situation of Black people in many Western countries has come under closer scrutiny and ethnic discrimination has been brought to the forefront. Little is known about hiring discrimination against Blacks in many European countries. In a correspondence test in the Swiss labour market, we sent fictitious paired applications by candidates of Swiss (ostensibly White) and Cameroonian descent…
South African Parties Hardly Politicise Immigration in Their Electoral Manifestos
To what extent do political parties in South Africa politicise immigration? We systematically analyse the party manifestos of all major parties in post-apartheid South Africa, using two separate approaches of content analysis: coding all sentences about immigration individually, and coding the electoral manifesto overall using a ‘checklist’. Although we can expect high politicisation of immigrants in new democracies, most party manifestos do not …
What Is the Nexus between Migration and Mobility? A Framework to Understand the Interplay between Different Ideal Types of Human Movement
Categorising certain forms of human movement as 'migration' and others as 'mobility' has far-reaching consequences. We introduce the migration-mobility nexus as a framework for other researchers to interrogate the relationship between these two categories of human movement and explain how they shape different social representations. Our framework articulates four ideal-typical interplays between categories of migration and categories of mobility:…
How one gesture curbed ethnic discrimination
Members of ethnic and racial minorities across North America and Europe continue to face discrimination, for instance, when applying for jobs or seeking housing. Such unequal treatment can occur because societies categorize people into groups along social, cultural, or ethnic and racial lines that seemingly rationalize differential treatment. Research suggests that it may take generations for such differences to decline, if they change at all. He…
Local-to-local electoral connections for migrants: The Association Between Voting Rights in the Place of Origin and the Propensity to Vote in the Place of Residence
Published online: 12 September 2022
How political reception contexts shape location decisions of immigrants
Several academic fields study how immigrants choose their place of residence when moving to, or within destination countries. Existing studies, however, focus on isolated factors, and we do not know whether political factors matter once we have accounted for well-established determinants. This paper examines the extent to which political factors, such as voting rights for foreign citizens, citizenship policies and popular support for right-populi…
Ethnic Group Representation in a Cross-National Comparison
This paper compares the levels of ethnic group representation in parliament in 95 democracies. The analyses are comparative in nature, breaking with the literature where single country studies are the norm. Considering both electoral and cultural variables, the results cast doubt on whether the role of the electoral system in shaping political representation is dominant. In contrast to what much of the literature suggests, once controlling for th…
The Relationship between Levels of Gender and Ethnic Group Representation: The Relationship between Levels of Gender and Ethnic Group Representation
This article examines the relationship between levels of gender representation and levels of ethnic group representation in national parliaments. Taagepera (1994) and Lijphart (1999) predicted that because of shared mechanisms and covariates levels of representation in the two forms should be positively correlated. Whilst this paper can identify a number of shared covariates, there is no evidence of an association between levels of gender and eth…
Individual Representation: A Different Approach to Political Representation
This article presents a new conceptualisation and measure of political representation to complement conventional approaches. Individual representation scores place the individual rather than the legislature at the centre, providing a fresh perspective on the relationship between inequality and representation. They are calculated by comparing first the position of the individual with other citizens, and second the position of the individual with t…
The Representation of Women in National Parliaments: A Cross-national Comparison
Women’s representation in national parliaments is examined using a large cross-national sample. Initially, the article seems to confirm previous findings that the electoral formula and quotas are good predictors for the proportion of women in parliament. In line with some recent contributions, this article finds that the proportion of women in parliament is explicable in terms of culture—particularly attitudes towards women as political leaders. …
Critical Mobilities
The field of mobility studies examines social phenomena through the lens of movement. In this perspective, societies are regarded as being constantly reconfigured as they are shaped by a series of mobile entities (capital, people, information). This book engages critically with many of the claims and challenges of mobility studies by providing empirically rich reports of mobilities and their limitations. Instead of assuming a seamless world of fl…
The Role of Language in the Automatic Coding of Political Texts
Automatic approaches to coding party manifestos and other political texts have become more widespread. This research note addresses the question to what extent the source language of a text affects the results. To do so, Swiss manifestos in German and French are coded automatically, comparing a keyword‐based dictionary approach and Wordscores. Because of language differences, both stemming and particularly stop words are important to obtain compa…
Obtaining Party Positions on Immigration in Switzerland: Comparing Different Methods
The position of political parties on policy issues is crucial for many questions of political science, including studies of political representation. This research note examines different methods for obtaining party positions on immigration in retrospective. Party positions are obtained using pooled expert surveys, manual coding of party manifestos with a conventional codebook, manual coding of manifestos using check‐lists, and automatic coding o…
The Politicisation of Migration
After discussing the patterns of politicisation in all seven countries separately, we move to cross-country comparisons. This allows us to identify general patterns that exist across all seven countries, and detect in which ways some patterns are country-specific. We will thus examine whether seemingly idiosyncratic patterns in the country chapters are actually reflections of structural features. In addition to addressing these questions, this ch…
Increasing Validity by Recombining Existing Indices: Mipex as a Measure of Citizenship Models
Objective Researchers often reuse existing data and indices even in cases where theory demands different measures. Here, I argue that with little additional effort, it is possible to increase the validity of research by recombining individual indicators of existing indices. Methods This approach is demonstrated by using data from the widely used Migration Integration Policy Index (MIPEX), recombining some of the 148 indicators to approximate Koop…
Immigration and Integration Policy in Switzerland, 1848 to 2014
The regulation of immigration and how immigrants are treated once they settle in a country are fundamental aspects of national policy. Existing descriptions of the developments of immigration and integration policy have either provided a limited snapshot, or relied on the author's subjective assessment of how policies developed over time. In this research note, we provide a systematic and truly historical assessment of immigration and integration…
The Gap between Public Preferences and Policies on Immigration: A Comparative Examination of the Effect of Politicisation on Policy Congruence
The existence of a gap between public preferences for more restrictive immigration policies and relatively expansive immigration policy in Western democracies has received considerable attention. Sometimes, this gap has been explained by the nature of immigration policies: dominated by elites while the public remained uninterested. In many countries, however, immigration has gained considerable salience among the public. There are competing expec…
A Foreigner who Does Not Steal My Job: The Role of Unemployment Risk and Values in Attitudes toward Equal Opportunities
Immigration has become systematically politicized and opposed by many individuals. We examine individual attitudes toward equal opportunities for foreigners and Swiss citizens, using cross-sectional data from the Swiss Household Panel. Individuals with low levels of education tend to oppose foreigners, while the opposition by individuals with high levels of education increases with the risk of unemployment. Values and beliefs explain the negative…
Ethnic discrimination in hiring decisions: A Meta-Analysis of Correspondence Tests 1990–2015
lt;p>For almost 50 years field experiments have been used to study ethnic and racial discrimination in hiring decisions, consistently reporting high rates of discrimination against minority applicants – including immigrants – irrespective of time, location, or minority groups tested. While Peter A. Riach and Judith Rich [2002. “Field Experiments of Discrimination in the Market Place.” The Economic Journal 112 (483): F480–F518] and Judith Rich [20…
Why religion? Immigrant groups as objects of political claims on immigration and civic integration in Western Europe, 1995–2009
Choosing Unauthorized Migration: Evidence from Return Migrants
We assess who among migrants is likely to choose unauthorized migration. While the literature has addressed reasons for unauthorized migration, we are the first to model individual choice of actual unauthorized migration. By using data from Albanian return migrants, we can ascertain that we capture actual migration – behaviour – rather than intentions to migrate, and respondents have no incentives to hide unauthorized migration as there are no co…
The positions mainstream left parties adopt on immigration: A cross-cutting cleavage
Immigration is often perceived as a political topic that overlaps traditional ideological cleavages. Much research has focused on the positions of the extreme right, and little research has examined mainstream parties and their public stances on immigration. This shortcoming hampers broader understanding of political competition on this issue. Drawing on a political claims analysis of seven countries between 1995 and 2009, we present the salience…
Participation in Local Elections: Why Don’t Immigrants Vote More
Why do immigrants vote less in local elections when they have the right to vote? I present a new representative survey on participation in the 2015 municipal elections in the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland, and predict electoral participation with logistic regression models. Most immigrant groups vote less than the majority population. Four explanations are tested for this difference: social origin (resources), political engagement, civic integrat…
Occupational exposure to foreigners and attitudes towards equal opportunities
We examine the relationship between attitudes to foreigners and the share of foreigners at the occupational level. Using a question on equal opportunities for foreigners from the Swiss Household Panel, ordered probit regression models show a negative association between the share of foreigners in one’s occupation and positive attitudes to foreigners: workers seem to react to competition with foreigners. When we add the occupational unemployment r…
How attitudes towards immigrants are shaped by residential context: The role of ethnic diversity dynamics and immigrant visibility
We examine how proportional changes in residential context are associated with changes in attitudes towards immigrants. We specifically examine ethnic diversity dynamics and immigrant visibility at the level of the neighbourhood. Following the ‘defended neighbourhood’ hypothesis, we focus on proportional change, not absolute numbers. Data from the Dutch LISS panel are analysed using fixed-effect models, measuring the composition of neighbourhoods…
Estimating party positions on immigration: Assessing the reliability and validity of different methods
We provide a systematic assessment of various methods to position political parties on immigration, a policy domain that does not necessarily overlap with left–right and is characterized by varying salience and issue complexity. Manual and automated coding methods drawing on 283 party manifestos are compared – manual sentence-by-sentence coding using a conventional codebook, manual coding using checklists, automated coding using Wordscores, Wordf…
South African Parties Hardly Politicise Immigration in Their Electoral Manifestos
To what extent do political parties in South Africa politicise immigration? We systematically analyse the party manifestos of all major parties in post-apartheid South Africa, using two separate approaches of content analysis: coding all sentences about immigration individually, and coding the electoral manifesto overall using a ‘checklist’. Although we can expect high politicisation of immigrants in new democracies, most party manifestos do not …
Attitudes to immigrants in South Africa: Personality and Vulnerability
While many countries across the world face increasing numbers of immigrants, the literature on attitudes to foreigners and immigrants focuses on Western countries. This article tests broad insights from Western countries in a specific non-Western context – South Africa, a country marked by sporadic violence against some immigrant groups. This provides an important validity check. Data from the 2013 South African Social Attitudes Survey and the 20…
Do we need multiple questions to capture feeling threatened by immigrants
Across Europe some individuals observe immigration with unease and feel threatened by immigrants. Most relevant surveys ask about ‘immigrants’ in the generic sense, but some differentiate between specific immigrant groups. This article uses 24 questions on potential neighbours to systematically vary the characteristics of immigrants in a representative survey in Switzerland, 2013. Respondents systematically consider immigrants from distant cultur…
Introduction: The Sociology of Migration in Switzerland: Past, Present and Future
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Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: African Migrants in the Spotlight
This thematic issue examines questions of decision-making under limited (and contradictory) information, focusing on migration decisions. Migrants are far from a homogenous population, but they commonly use narratives as heuristics. We observe much agency among migrants to pursue migration plans, with migration decisions best understood as chains of multiple decisions rather than simple push-pull or two-step models
Political science (41 works) · Sociology (36 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (34 works) · Law (32 works) · Economics (29 works) · Immigration (27 works) · Demographic economics (20 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (20 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (18 works)