Sergi Pardos-Prado

The Big Five Personality Traits and Attitudes towards Immigrants

Recent research suggests that the Big Five personality traits are important determinants of a wide range of political and social attitudes. In spite of this, the impact of personality traits on attitudes towards immigrants has been unattended in sociological research. On the basis of insights from personality psychology, we extend the sociological approach to immigrant-specific prejudice by analysing the effects of personality using a large and nationally representative sample of the Dutch population. Moreover, we consider personality jointly with situational predictors of attitudes towards immigrants. The results confirm that some personality traits are associated with attitudes towards immigrants, beyond the effect of socio-economic, attitudinal and contact predictors. We conclude that combining insights from sociology and personality psychology in the study of dispositional and situational determinants of attitudes towards immigration is a fruitful avenue for research.

Group Conflict Theory in a Longitudinal Perspective: Analyzing the Dynamic Side of Ethnic Competition

One of the most established approaches to explain attitudes toward immigration is group conflict theory. However, even though the theory was articulated in dynamic terms, previous research has almost exclusively tested it through cross-sectional analyses. The aim of this study is to disentangle the dynamic character of ethnic competition from more permanent determinants of ethnic threat. The findings show that a remarkable variation of concern over immigration, usually attributed to permanent positions of economic vulnerability, disappears when within-person variation is modeled. In line with a dynamic approach of ethnic competition, becoming unemployed or being laid off increases concern over immigration. This effect is independent of social class.

Framing Attitudes Towards Immigrants in Europe: When Competition Does Not Matter

The socio-economic conditions of native populations and axioms derived from ethnic competition theory have often been used to account for xenophobic attitudes. By contrast, much less research has been conducted on the impact of ideological structures on the formation of attitudes towards immigration. This paper aims to fill this gap by suggesting that broad ideological structures in terms of left–right self-placements are important cognitive determinants of attitudes towards migrants when the direct experience of competition for scarce resources is lower. It shows that political preferences structure attitudes when the socio-economic vulnerability of citizens and geographical contexts are low enough for migrants not to be framed as a direct threat. Economic vulnerability is thus theorised to overcome the resistance of ideological predispositions. The findings are obtained through hierarchical linear models using the 2002–03 European Social Survey.

How Can Mainstream Parties Prevent Niche Party Success? Center-Right Parties and the Immigration Issue

The individual and systemic determinants of radical right voting in Europe have been thoroughly analyzed in past research. Surprisingly, these studies have largely ignored the conditions under which moderate parties can limit the success of radical actors from a spatial perspective. This article shows that center-right parties can more successfully compete on the immigration issue when the issue space is one-dimensional and when immigration party positions are correlated with broader economic and cultural dimensions of competition. My findings highlight the critical role of economic dimensions of competition, which are usually neglected when explaining radical right success and failure.

The Political Conditioning of Subjective Economic Evaluations: The Role of Party Discourse

Classic and revisionist perspectives on economic voting have thoroughly analyzed the role of macroeconomic indicators and individual partisanship as determinants of subjective evaluations of the national economy. Surprisingly, however, top-down analysis of parties’ capacity to cue and persuade voters about national economic conditions is absent in the debate. This study uses a novel dataset containing monthly economic salience in party parliamentary speeches, macroeconomic indicators and individual survey data covering the four last electoral cycles in Spain (1996–2011). The results show that the salience of economic issues in the challenger’s discourse substantially increases negative evaluations of performance when this challenger is the owner of the economic issue. While a challenger’s conditioning of public economic evaluations is independent of the state of the economy (and can affect citizens with different ideological orientations), incumbent parties are more constrained by the true state of the economy in their ability to persuade the electorate on this issue.