Immigrants’ Political Integration in
Anti- and Pro-Immigrant Contexts
Maria Tyrberg
Doctoral Dissertation in Political Science
Department of Political Science
University of Gothenburg
2022
c© Maria Tyrberg
Printing: Stema, Bor˚as, 2022
ISBN: 978-91-8009-572-3 (print)
ISBN: 978-91-8009-573-0 (pdf)
http://hdl.handle.net/2077/69871
Published articles have been reprinted with permission from the copyright
holders. This dissertation is included as number 169 in Go¨teborg Studies
in Politics, edited by Johannes Lindvall, Department of Political Science,
University of Gothenburg, Box 711, 405 30 Go¨teborg, Sweden.
Abstract
Millions of people have migrated to Europe during the last decades. As a
result, the issue of immigrant integration in host societies has received in-
creased attention among scholars and policymakers. The question of how
to achieve successful political integration of the large new immigrant pop-
ulation is commonly addressed in the literature using individual-level pre-
dictors. In this dissertation, I argue for the need to also take into account
the surrounding environment, focusing on how informal social and politi-
cal contexts can hinder or foster immigrants’ political integration. More
specifically, this dissertation contributes to a nascent literature as it focuses
on how anti- and pro-immigrant contexts influence immigrants’ feelings of
belonging, political trust and equal engagement to the political community.
In the three individual research papers of the dissertation, I focus on dif-
ferent types of contexts and psychological and behavioural components of
political integration. The findings underline the importance of equal treat-
ment between immigrants and natives in host societies to achieve successful
integration. In addition, I find the contextual effects to vary between con-
texts, and depending on immigrant generation and origin. These findings
have substantial implications for our understanding of host societies’ roles
in immigrant integration.

Sammanfattning p˚a svenska
Miljontals ma¨nniskor har under de senaste decennierna invandrat till Eu-
ropa. Som en fo¨ljd av den stora invandringen har forskares och beslutsfattares
intresse fo¨r integrationen av utlandsfo¨dda inv˚anare i mottagarla¨nderna o¨kat.
Fo¨r att besvara fr˚agan om hur man a˚stadkommer politisk integration av den
nya populationen av utlandsfo¨dda utg˚ar den tidigare forskningen framfo¨rallt
fr˚an fo¨rklaringsfaktorer p˚a individniv˚a. I den ha¨r avhandlingen argumenterar
jag fo¨r vikten av att ocks˚a ha den omgivande miljo¨n i a˚tanke, genom att
fokusera p˚a hur informella sociala och politiska kontexter kan hindra eller
fra¨mja utlandsfo¨dda inv˚anares politiska integration. Avhandlingen bidrar
mer specifikt till ett nytt men va¨xande forskningsfa¨lt genom att fokusera
p˚a hur miljo¨er som a¨r anti- eller pro- invandrare p˚averkar utlandsfo¨dda
inv˚anares ka¨nsla av nationell tillho¨righet, politiskt fo¨rtroende och politiskt
engagemang. Jag fokuserar p˚a olika slags kontexter och olika aspekter av
politisk integration i de tre frist˚aende artiklarna i avhandlingen. Resul-
taten visar p˚a vikten av ja¨mlik behandling av utlandsfo¨dda fo¨r att uppn˚a
integration. Resultaten visar ocks˚a att den kontextuella effekten varierar
mellan omgivningar och a¨ven mellan invandringsgenerationer och ursprung.
De ha¨r resultaten har betydande konsekvenser fo¨r v˚ar fo¨rst˚aelse fo¨r motta-
garla¨ndernas roll i integrationen av utlandsfo¨dda.
III

Acknowledgements
Many people have helped and encouraged me in the process of writing this
dissertation. First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisors for
providing support and company during these past years. Thank you to Pe-
ter Esaiasson and Frida Bora¨ng, who have been involved in the project from
the onset. The two of you are very different, but equally great. Peter, you
have a fascinating mix of abilities. You are constantly busy, but always take
the time to discuss whatever issues I have without seeming rushed. You
also ask the big and challenging questions, but at the same time provide a
genuine feeling that all is going well. Frida, you have such a skill for provid-
ing comments and critique while giving excellent suggestions for solutions.
Sorry for including you in way too many emails, but you always have valu-
able insights that I want to make use of. So, sorry not sorry. I am also very
grateful that Linna Marte´n joined as a third supervisor midway through the
project. Thank you Linna for coming in with a new set of very useful skills
for the project and for connecting me with relevant people within the field.
I would not even have considered the possibility to apply to the PhD
program if it hadn’t been for Carl Dahlstro¨m. Thank you Carl for being ex-
tremely generous with your support as a master’s thesis supervisor, project
leader and co-author. Without it, this dissertation would not exist.
Several people have provided comments on this dissertation throughout
various stages of the process, all have helped in bringing the project forward.
Thank you to Jonathan Polk, Maria Solevid, Patrik O¨hberg, Lene Aarøe,
Mikael Persson, Jacob Sohlberg and Henrik Ekengren Oscarsson.
During these years, I have had the opportunity to cooperate with other
academics outside of my project. Jens Rydgren, Marina Nistotskaya, Con-
stanza Sanhueza Petrarca and Steven Wilson, thank you for the possibility
to learn from and write papers with you.
I want to thank my PhD cohort, Valeriya Mechkova, Love Christensen
and Felix Dwinger, for being the smartest, nicest, and most fun group of
people one could end up with. These last five years would have been sig-
nificantly less great without you. I also want to thank past and present
PhD students for being an excellent community of support and friendship:
Moa Fro¨din Gruneau, Marcus Tannenberg, Mattias Agerberg, Ezgi Irgil,
Frida Nilsson, Felix Hartmann, Anne-Kathrin Kreft, Jonas Bergan Dræge,
Prisca Jo¨st, Stephen Dawson, Dragana Davidovic, Nick Sorak, Erik Vestin,
V
Elina Lindgren, Elias Markstedt, Marina Povitkina, Elin Bergman, Laura
Lungu, Felicia Robertson, Magnus A˚sblad, Lisanne de Blok, Aino Tiihonen
and Hyunjung Kim.
Thank you to Lena Caspers, Karin Jorthe´, Caroline Fa¨llgren, Maria
Lilleste, Johanna Kviberg, Ola Bjo¨rklund and Erol Canpunar. Not only
have you helped me with all issues related to administration, you are also
such a genuinely nice group of people.
I want to collectively thank all colleagues at the department for pro-
viding a very constructive and social research environment, making it a
great place to work. I especially want to thank Jon Pierre, Ulf Bjereld,
Anna Persson, Lena Wa¨ngnerud, Marcia Grimes, Josefine Pernes, Natasha
Stepanova, Rasmus Broms, Olof Larsson, Andrej Kokkonen, Sofia Axelsson,
Victor Lapuente, Monika Bauhr, Dalila Sabanic, Agnes Cornell, Mikael Gill-
jam, Ann-Kristin Jonasson, Nesrine Ben Brahim, Go¨ran Duus-Otterstro¨m,
Anders Sundell, Dennis Andersson, Martin Sjo¨stedt, Ann-Kristin Ko¨lln, Ur-
ban Strandberg, Aksel Sundstro¨m, Natalia Alvarado Pachon, Kyle Mar-
quardt, Richard Karlsson, Elin Naurin, Ann Towns, Anna Bendz, Angel-
ica Thell, Henrik Friberg-Fernros, Karin Andersson, Kristen Kao, Andreas
B˚agenholm, Christin Forsberg and Jonas Hinnfors. I have really enjoyed
all the academic and non-academic discussions with you during seminars,
lunches, teaching, coffees, after works and travels.
During the PhD program, I had the possibility to visit the Immigration
Policy Lab in Zu¨rich for a semester. This was definitely one of the highlights
of the program. I want to thank Dominik Hangartner, Selina Kurer and the
rest of the IPL Zu¨rich for including me in such a friendly and inspiring re-
search team. I also want to thank Pa¨r Nyman for enabling a research visit
to the political science department in Uppsala, and Gina Gustavsson and
the other participants at the Polsek seminar for very helpful comments on
my work.
The conferences, research visits, courses and data collections would not
have been possible without external funding. I am highly grateful to Adler-
bertska stiftelserna, Gertrude och Ivar Philipsons Stiftelse, Helge Ax:son
Johnsons stiftelse, Knut och Alice Wallenbergs Stiftelse, Kungliga Veten-
skapsakademien, Kungliga Vitterhetsakademien, Lundgrens stiftelser and
Stiftelsen Lars Hiertas Minne for providing scholarships that have covered
these costs.
VI
I want to thank my friends outside of the academia for being fun and
distracting me from the academia. A special thanks to Sara, my go-to per-
son at all times.
To my mom and dad. Thank you for showing constant trust in my abil-
ities and real interest in what I do. For this, I’m truly grateful. To my
brothers, Simon and Ma˚rten, you may have set impossible standards to fol-
low, but I’m very glad I get to learn from your brilliant minds.
Finally, to my wonderful family, Niklas and Bill. Thank you for being
my constant reminders that the trams keep running, and for being the ones
I always look forward to spending my weekends with.
VII

Contents
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Twelve gaps and ten contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.1.1 Gaps one to six: Contextual variation . . . . . . . . . 5
1.1.2 Gaps seven to twelve: Heterogeneous effects within
the immigrant group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2 Theoretical framework 12
2.1 Contextual effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.2 Anti- and pro-immigrant contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.3 Political integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.4 Symbolic and material values as causal mechanisms . . . . . . 18
2.5 Heterogeneous effects within the immigrant group . . . . . . 21
3 Research design 25
3.1 Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
3.2 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3.3 Ethical considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
4 Descriptions of individual papers 32
4.1 Paper 1: Immigrants’ electoral participation – The cross-
national impact of public and political hostility . . . . . . . . 32
4.2 Paper 2: Support for the political community in a commu-
nity that doesn’t support you: Immigrant youths’ exposure
to anti-immigrant attitudes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
4.3 Paper 3: Integration, Discrimination, and Pro-Immigrant Sup-
port - Surprising Insights from a Survey Experiment in Ger-
many and Sweden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
5 Summary, limitations, and future avenues of research 39
6 Conclusions 43
Included papers I-III 57
IX
LIST OF TABLES
List of Tables
1 Gaps and contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2 Gaps, contributions and empirical findings . . . . . . . . . . . 38
X
1 INTRODUCTION
1 Introduction
Millions of people have migrated to Europe during the last decades. With
immigrants constituting more than ten per cent of the population in some
of the receiving countries1, international migration and its societal implica-
tions have become one of the key political issues of our time. As a result,
the issue of immigrant integration in host societies has received increased
attention among scholars and policymakers.
Parallel to this development, we see that many countries are becom-
ing more openly hostile towards immigrants. For instance, in September
2010, the Sweden Democrats entered the Swedish national parliament with
a distinct anti-immigrant agenda. As part of their electoral campaign, they
launched an advertisement that illustrated a literal race for public resources,
where a group of women in burkas challenged an old native pensioner. The
electoral success of the Sweden Democrats thereby entailed a new social and
political context for immigrants in Sweden. Socially, immigrants were made
aware that a significant share of natives favoured anti-immigrant policies.
Politically, anti-immigrant attitudes were legitimized in the political sphere.
Moreover, an anti-immigrant party now had the parliamentary means nec-
essary to implement policies.
1Pew Research Center (2016), Eurostat Statistics Explained (2019)
1
1 INTRODUCTION
What happens when certain groups of individuals face such manifes-
tations of exclusion? And more generally, how do we achieve feelings of
belonging and equal engagement to the political community in a diverse so-
ciety? The research field attempting to explain anti-immigrant attitudes and
their translation into votes for anti-immigrant parties is vast and continu-
ously growing (Norris 2005; Schneider 2008; Kaufmann 2014), but the focus
in this literature is mainly on the perspectives of natives. The potential im-
pact on the group who is targeted by the hostility – people with immigrant
backgrounds – has received far less attention. Positioned in the centre of the
debate, immigrants’ presence is often used as an explanation for increased
anti-immigrant attitudes. Their own psychological and behavioural reac-
tions to hostile socio-political contexts have, however, only recently begun
to attract scholarly focus (Maxwell 2009; Connor 2010; Heath and Demireva
2014; Just and Anderson 2014; Pe´rez 2015; Just 2017; Simonsen 2021a,b).
This dissertation contributes to the nascent literature as it focuses on how
anti- and pro-immigrant contexts influence immigrants’ political integration.
This is the overarching research question of the dissertation, which is ad-
dressed in various ways throughout the three individual papers.
Political integration is a multidimensional concept that ranges from the
way immigrants view the political society and their position within it to
their actual engagement in political institutions. These subjective and be-
havioural components are essential for a diverse and multicultural society
to function effectively. The subjective sense of inclusion is needed in order
to achieve social cohesion (Miller and Ali 2014). If immigrants do not feel a
sense of belonging to the host society, polarization and discontent are likely
to increase. The behavioural aspect of inclusion is, in turn, needed to ensure
equal participation and democratic legitimacy (Verba et al. 1995). Further-
more, if immigrants do not participate in the political society, their voices
will remain unheard. This may, for instance, bias public policy against
immigrant preferences (Vernby 2013). In terms of the general inclusion of
immigrants in the host society, political integration also correlates with other
dimensions of integration, such as social and economic integration (Harder
et al. 2018). Successful integration of immigrants in the political society
is, therefore, not only significant in itself but may also spill over to other
dimensions and increase inclusion in a broader sense.
The question of how to achieve successful political integration has been
2
1 INTRODUCTION
addressed in previous research using individual-level predictors. The liter-
ature focuses on individual characteristics explaining why some individuals
integrate, whereas others do not. This approach reflects the literature on po-
litical behaviour in general, where the Michigan school’s focus on individual-
oriented explanations for long dominated the research field (Campbell 2013).
Explanations to political behaviour in this field often centre around socioe-
conomic factors, such as the individual’s educational level or occupational
status. However, when it comes to immigrants’ political behaviour, these
standard socioeconomic predictors have proven less useful (Cho 1999; Fen-
nema and Tillie 1999). In developing this strand, scholars have argued for
the importance of taking migration specific factors into account, such as age
of entry (Wass et al. 2015), competence in the host language (Maxwell and
Bleich 2014; Norris and Puranen 2019) and citizenship (Maxwell and Bleich
2014; Leszczensky et al. 2019).
The migration specific factors are, however, also relevant at the contex-
tual level. Instead of looking for explanations to political integration within
the individual, a contextual perspective centres on how aspects within the
surrounding environment hinder or foster immigrants’ political integration.
This approach is in line with the scholarly tradition of the Columbia school,
where contexts, communities and social networks are argued to be key in
shaping individuals’ political behaviour and beliefs (Campbell 2013). Yet,
the contextual perspective has been used significantly less in understanding
immigrants’ attitudes and behaviour. This is, again, in contrast to the large
field that examines natives’ attitudes towards immigration, where contex-
tual explanations are studied extensively (e.g. Kaufmann and Harris 2015;
Rydgren and Tyrberg 2020).
Within the limited research field that does emphasize the importance of
contexts for immigrants’ political integration, most centre on formal institu-
tional conditions that can hinder or promote inclusion, such as legal access to
citizenship (Hainmueller et al. 2015) and voting rights (Song 2009; Ferwerda
et al. 2020). My main claim in this dissertation is that informal social and
political contexts also shape immigrants’ political integration, in addition
to individual and formal contextual factors. Such informal contexts include,
for instance, the attitudes towards immigration within the general public or
among people in the nearby surrounding. Drawing on social identity theory
(Tajfel and Turner 1979) and realistic interest theories (Bobo 1983), I pro-
3
1 INTRODUCTION
pose that informal social and political contexts can provide distinct threats
or benefits to the immigrant group, changing the ways immigrants view and
participate in the political society. I hereby build on the notion of integra-
tion as a two-way process (e.g. Ager and Strang 2008; Phillimore 2012). In
other words, I address integration as a process that is not only dependent on
the achievements of immigrants but also the structure within the receiving
society.
1.1 Twelve gaps and ten contributions
My dissertation contributes to a small but growing literature that studies
the effects of social and political contexts on immigrants’ political integra-
tion. This is a nascent research field, where the results so far are patchy
and sometimes inconsistent. Empirical findings in this literature indicate
negative effects of anti-immigrant contexts on immigrants’ subjective politi-
cal integration, with decreased political trust (Pe´rez 2015; Simonsen 2021a)
and satisfaction with democracy (Just 2017) in more hostile contexts. The
effects of anti-immigrant contexts on political behaviour in turn indicate
either a mobilizing (Jones-Correa 2001; Pantoja et al. 2001; Okamoto and
Ebert 2010) or demobilizing (Just and Anderson 2014; Simonsen 2021b)2
impact on political participation.
On reviewing this literature, I identify and address twelve gaps that have
been theoretically or methodologically overlooked on the contextual or indi-
vidual side. These twelve gaps can be broadly categorized into two themes:
i) the various ways contexts influence individuals, and ii) the heterogenous
effects within the immigrant group. These gaps, including how my disser-
tation contributes by addressing (most of) them, are discussed here and
covered in detail throughout the kappa.
2For clarification, Just and Anderson (2014) study the reverse, finding a mobilizing
influence of pro-immigrant attitudes, which is interpreted here as a demobilizing effect of
anti-immigrant attitudes.
4
1 INTRODUCTION
1.1.1 Gaps one to six: Contextual variation
The first gap is about the methodological approach in testing contextual
effects. Previous studies here mainly rely on observational data, testing
the correlation between context and political attitudes (Jones-Correa 2001;
Pantoja et al. 2001; Just and Anderson 2014; Just 2017, but see Jasinskaja-
Lahti et al. 2009, Pe´rez 2015 and Fouka 2019 for causal exceptions). The
observational correlation approach is based on the assumption that individ-
uals are aware of and react to the contextual characteristics of our interest.
People are, however, embedded in a variety of contextual settings. This
suggests that we cannot be certain if our context of interest is the key factor
driving individual behaviour. My argument here is rather straightforward
and concerns the need to further test the causal contextual effects in order
to rule out endogeneity. In this dissertation, I address this by distributing a
survey experiment in two national contexts, randomly assigning respondents
to treatment and control groups to test the causal contextual effects.
The second gap is theoretical and concerns the degrees of contextual hos-
tility. Contexts are, in general, more or less welcoming or hostile towards
immigrants. Empirically, this can be measured using a unipolar scale with
categories of hostility organised along a continuum, or a bipolar scale with
opposing positive and negative ends (Ho¨hne et al. 2020). Previous studies
have mainly focused on hostility using a unipolar scale, ranging from neutral
to hostile, rather than a bipolar scale, ranging from welcoming, over neu-
tral, to hostile. Considerably less theoretical attention has been paid to how
welcoming contexts may shape immigrants’ political integration (see Just
and Anderson 2014, and Bennour and Manatschal 2019 for correlational ex-
ceptions). Expanding the theoretical focus, I propose that pro-immigrant
contexts can increase immigrants’ subjective political integration by rais-
ing the symbolic or material value of the immigrant group. I develop this
reasoning in the dissertation, and empirically test the causal effect of pro-
immigrant support.
The third gap concerns the discrepancy between the theoretical notion of
contextual effects and the empirical approach in how contextual effects are
studied. Theoretically, contexts are expected to affect individual behaviour
through direct interactions (Huckfeldt and Sprague 1993) or through cues
picked up from the surrounding environment (Brooks and Prysby 1991; Cho
and Rudolph 2008). Most studies on contexts and immigrants’ integration,
5
1 INTRODUCTION
however, empirically centre only on the cues. Scholars in this field study
contextual effects in larger geographically divided environments, such as
countries or regions. Within these, individuals are assumed to respond to
socio-political surroundings related to immigration, such as law proposals
(Jones-Correa 2001; Pantoja et al. 2001) or public attitudes (Just and An-
derson 2014). However, much less work is done in more fine-grained sur-
roundings where we can expect contextual effects as a result of individual
interactions. I argue that we need to examine both types of contexts in
order to fully understand when and how contexts shape immigrants’ politi-
cal integration. In the individual papers of the dissertation, I contribute by
examining both large-scale and fine-grained contexts.
The fourth gap is whether the contextual effect differs depending on the
type of context. In other words, whether spatial and functional contexts vary
in how they shape immigrants’ political integration. Examples of questions
to address here is if the contextual effect varies in strength depending on
context type. Or, if certain types of contexts only influence certain aspects
of political integration. These questions remain unanswered and demand
more theorizing and empirical testing. Although I address the issue briefly
in the theoretical section of the kappa, I did not test the variation empiri-
cally in the papers of the dissertation.
The fifth gap is specifically about contextual effects and political be-
haviour. As mentioned previously, empirical findings here indicate a mobi-
lizing (Jones-Correa 2001; Pantoja et al. 2001) or demobilizing (Just and
Anderson 2014; Simonsen 2021b) impact on political participation in more
hostile contexts. Nonetheless, these contradicting findings do not necessarily
contradict theoretical expectations, as it is argued that hostility can either
engage or disengage, depending on the circumstances (as discussed further
in the theoretical framework). The research field on contextual hostility and
political participation is, however, difficult to overview empirically due to
variation in the contextual setting, type of political participation, and im-
migrant group. The majority of previous findings on mobilisation concerns
electoral participation and stems from research conducted in the United
States, focusing mainly on the voting behaviour of Latinos who are targeted
by the hostility (Jones-Correa 2001; Pantoja et al. 2001). The findings on
demobilisation in turn come from Europe, and primarily concern informal
types of political participation within the general immigrant group, but not
6
1 INTRODUCTION
voting (Just and Anderson 2014). In this dissertation, I limit the variation
to enable a more comparable setting, by testing the influence of contextual
hostility on electoral participation in Europe. In addition, I narrow the fo-
cus to non-Western immigrants. While different from the Latino group in
the US in many ways, non-Western immigrants are those mainly targeted
by hostility in Europe.
The sixth gap concerns the electoral success of anti-immigrant parties
in Europe. As argued by Minkenberg (2001), there has been a transfor-
mation in the concept of the ‘people’ where anti-immigrant parties exercise
executive power. This entails a shift from the encompassing demos to the
more exclusive ethnos, excluding immigrants from the democratic society.
The presence of anti-immigrant parties has also been shown to heighten
the focus on ethnicity and nationality among residents and political parties
(Rydgren 2003; Pirro 2015). The party presence thereby signals a legitimiza-
tion of anti-immigrant attitudes in the political sphere as well. Focusing on
the subjective dimension of political integration, Just (2017) shows negative
correlations between anti-immigrant party strength and satisfaction with
democracy among immigrant non-citizens in Europe. The influence of anti-
immigrant party strength on political participation, however, remains un-
explored. Hence, in this dissertation, I test the influence of anti-immigrant
party strength on immigrants’ voting across Europe.
1.1.2 Gaps seven to twelve: Heterogeneous effects within the
immigrant group
The seventh gap concerns the group targeted by hostility. When it comes
to quantitative studies on immigrants in Europe, the focus is primarily on
a general division between immigrants and natives (e.g. Just and Ander-
son 2014; Just 2017), or Muslims specifically (e.g. Lajevardi and Oskooii
2018; Leszczensky et al. 2019; Simonsen 2021a). The first approach is broad
and vague and potentially problematic, since it encompasses all immigrants
rather than those who are actually targeted by anti-immigrant expressions.
On the contrary, the second approach is more on point because the Muslim
population is one of the main targeted groups. Therefore, I believe it is
necessary to expand the scope further. Immigrants originating from non-
Western countries are, in practice, exposed to anti-immigrant expressions
regardless of their religious affiliation. By focusing on immigrants in gen-
7
1 INTRODUCTION
eral, we miss important variations within the immigrant group. By only
focusing on Muslim immigrants, we disregard a large part of the targeted
group. I, therefore, propose a middle ground and contribute by focusing on
the larger immigrant group that is mainly targeted, primarily immigrants
born in Africa or Asia.
The eighth gap relates to the individual’s time spent in the country,
where previous research points to conflicting theoretical expectations re-
garding how immigrants with different integration levels will respond to anti-
immigrant expressions. The second-generation of immigrants (i.e. children
of immigrants), or immigrants who have lived longer in the host country,
can be expected to react either more weakly (Alba and Nee 1997; Michelson
2003) or more strongly (Michelson 2003; Heath and Demireva 2014; Platt
2014) to anti-immigrant contexts than the first-generation or newly arrived
immigrants. Despite these contrasting expectations, few studies compare
the contextual effects between generations or integration levels; of these,
the comparison is between different age groups (e.g. Pe´rez 2015; Simonsen
2021a). This indicates there are a number of potential unobserved con-
founders that can influence the results. I contribute here by testing the con-
trary theoretical expectations and comparing the contextual effect on first-
and second-generation immigrants within the same cohort. This approach
further enables isolating the generational effect, keeping unobserved con-
founders constant. In addition, I compare the effect within first-generation
immigrants with varying time spent in the country, including recently ar-
rived immigrants.
The ninth gap also concerns the level of integration within the first gen-
eration of immigrants. Most studies on political integration are about immi-
grants that are already integrated, since surveys generally have difficulties
reaching immigrants who are less integrated. This may be attributed to
the fact that traditional surveys, such as the European Social Survey, are
conducted in the language of the host society. The language barrier inher-
ent in the survey layout entails that those immigrants that are included are
likely to be integrated to a higher extent than in the actual population.
However, studies on newly arrived immigrants are limited, suggesting our
lack of knowledge concerning the political attitudes within the most recently
arrived immigrant groups. This is crucial information because previous re-
search suggests that the period after arrival represents an ‘integration win-
8
1 INTRODUCTION
dow’ in which immigrants may be open to habit change. In addition, the
surrounding context can play an important role during this period (Ferwerda
et al. 2020). In this dissertation, I use a novel research design in order to
attract respondents with varying integration levels, including newly arrived
immigrants.
The tenth gap relates to both contexts and heterogeneous effects. It
is about the causal mechanisms that explain why contexts influence immi-
grants’ political integration. Previous research includes theoretical discus-
sions on several potential mechanisms, such as threats to symbolic (Pe´rez
2015) or material (Pantoja et al. 2001; Ramakrishnan and Espenshade 2001)
interests, social costs of participation (Just and Anderson 2014), and the
level of group boundaries (Okamoto and Ebert 2010). Few, however, test
the proposed causal mechanisms empirically, and they center only on one
type of mechanism (e.g. Pe´rez 2015), rather than comparing between mech-
anisms. This suggests a black box in the research field concerning why
contexts matter still exists. As most prior scholars, I, too, am unable to
address this gap empirically in this dissertation; nonetheless, I discuss it
further in the theoretical section.
The eleventh gap goes beyond the heterogeneous immigrant group and
concerns the relevance of comparing effects between immigrants and natives.
Previous studies on contextual effects and immigrants’ political integration
rely on samples that are limited to the immigrant population only (e.g.
Jones-Correa 2001; Just and Anderson 2014; Pe´rez 2015, but see Simonsen
2021b for qualitative exception). However, this is potentially problematic
because it limits the interpretation scope. When analyzing the contextual
effect only within the immigrant group, it is unclear whether the noticed in-
fluence also exists among natives. An impact on natives would theoretically
signal that the causal mechanism concerns all residents, regardless of the
position as the actual target of the hostile context. This would suggest a
more general influence than what is theorised, or potential additional causal
mechanisms. The relevance of group comparisons is further exemplified by
Maxwell (2013), who showed that the political attitudes of residents with
migrant origin mirrors those of natives within the same subnational region.
Disregarding the potential similarities between groups can, therefore, result
in misleading conclusions. In the dissertation, I address this by either com-
paring the contextual effects between immigrants and natives or running
9
1 INTRODUCTION
robustness tests on the native group.
The twelfth and final gap is not directly connected to heterogeneous
effects, but concerns the general focus on adult immigrants in existing stud-
ies. We know considerable less about the contextual influence on immigrant
youths (see Leszczensky et al. 2019 for exception). Early adolescence is an
important transition period for civic development (Metz and Youniss 2005;
Eckstein et al. 2012). Moreover, it is a time period where attitudes towards
the political community typically arise (Easton 1975). In other words, the
influence of contextual hostility is likely to be stronger among the younger
than the older generation. In addition, in line with the impressionable years
hypothesis, experiences in young adolescence can shape adult political be-
liefs (Beck and Jennings 1982; Krosnick and Alwin 1989; Pacheco 2008).
The contextual influence is, thereby, not only likely to be more pronounced
among youths but it also risks sticking into adulthood. Here, I contribute by
providing insights into immigrant youths’ political integration by studying
the contextual influence in school classes.
The twelve gaps, including how my dissertation contributes to address-
ing ten of them, are shown in Table 1. The kappa continues further with
an outline of the theoretical framework, starting with definitions of the key
concepts. I then present the research design and briefly summarize the pa-
pers included in this dissertation. In addition, I include an updated table
of the gaps and contributions where I summarise the main findings of the
dissertation. In the summary section, I review the empirical results, propose
future avenues of research and highlight some of the remaining unsolved is-
sues. The last section concludes by discussing the overall takeaways from
the dissertation and policy implications.
10
1 INTRODUCTION
Table 1: Gaps and contributions
Gap Contribution
1. Causal studies missing Test causality in a survey experiment
2. Theoretical focus on the anti-immigrant Theoretically and empirically address the
part of scale only influence of pro-immigrant support
3. Spatial types of contexts only Study functional contexts
4. Comparing functional and spatial Not addressed empirically
contexts
5. Contextual hostility and voting, Study contextual hostility and
only in the US voting in Europe
6. Anti-immigrant parties and Test influence of anti-immigrant
voting party strength on voting
7. Focus on targeted group too Study non-Western immigrants within
broad (or narrow) targeted group
8. Integration effects missing Compare contextual effect between
generations within the same cohort,
and within the first generation
9. Highly integrated immigrants Use Facebook ads to attract
only newly arrived immigrants
10. Comparison of causal mechanisms Not addressed empirically
missing
11. Contextual effects tested among Compare contextual effect between
immigrants only immigrants and natives
12. Immigrant adults only Study immigrant youths
11
2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
2 Theoretical framework
2.1 Contextual effects
Individuals are not isolated entities. We face and interact with our neigh-
bourhood, school or workplace daily, and take part in the local and national
community through news reports and socio-political debates. Theories of
contextual effects take these environments into account and pays attention
to how institutional, cultural and political surroundings shape individual
behaviour (Anderson 2009).
The tradition of contextual analyses can be traced back to the landmark
studies of Herbert Tingsten and V.O. Key, who found that the surrounding
environment matters for individual behaviour in various ways. Studying
working-class voting patterns in Stockholm during the 1920s and 1930s,
Tingsten (1937) found the individual propensity to vote for a socialist party
to be contingent on the characteristics of the precincts. Socialist parties in
working-class precincts received a disproportionately high share of votes in
comparison to other precincts. Key (1949) in turn studied racial hostility in
the American South. Analyzing aggregate voting records, he found that hos-
tility towards blacks among Southern whites varied as a function of black
population concentrations. The most racist political candidates received
the most support in counties with higher concentrations of black citizens.
Centring on different types of contexts and mechanisms, these studies by
Tingsten and Key signify two groundbreaking examples of empirical studies
on contextual effects. Since then, the field has continued to grow within a
12
2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
number of research fields.
In defining contextual effects in its broadest sense, they operate when
‘individual behaviour depends upon some individually external factor after
all individual level determinants have been taken into account’ (Huckfeldt
and Sprague 1993). In other words, they operate when the behaviour of
a person in a certain context changes when that same person is placed in
another context with other characteristics. This definition clarifies the core
concept of the theory, although it is perhaps a bit too general and encom-
passing. Narrowing the definition further, it is useful to think of contexts
through functional and spatial approaches. The functional approach centres
on the social interaction between individuals, where the context is created
as a result of these interactions. Typical examples of functional contexts
include workplaces, schools or organisations, where individuals meet and
interact on a regular basis (Huckfeldt and Sprague 1993). The context is,
in this sense, not restricted to geography. People can meet and interact
through functional contexts while otherwise separated in different spatial
contexts. More importantly, interaction is perceived as the key mechanism
in explaining why contexts influence individual behaviour.
In contrast to the functional perspective, the spatial approach focuses on
geographical division. In this line of thought, contexts are seen as geograph-
ically bounded units, ranging from fine-grained to large-scale environments.
People are, from the spatial perspective, nested in geographical regions such
as districts, municipalities and nations (Brooks and Prysby 1991). Whereas
the functional approach centres on interaction as the key mechanism, the
spatial perspective sees the space and place as significant in themselves in
explaining individual behaviour, not only through the interactions that oc-
cur within them. For instance, introducing the term ‘casual observation’,
Cho and Rudolph (2008) suggest geographic (spatial) contexts to have an
impact through indirect social interaction. Without requiring any actual
intimacy, regular exposure to people and events in the surrounding envi-
ronment provide subtle cues about the norms and distribution of political
preferences within the community.
While some studies on contextual effects centre on the mechanisms active
in either the functional or spatial perceptions of contexts, these approaches
are not mutually exclusive. They can rather be used to highlight the various
ways in which the surrounding environment affect individual behaviour. I
13
2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
argue that this is relevant to bear in mind when studying the influence of ex-
clusive and inclusive contexts on immigrants’ political integration. We still
lack knowledge in this literature as to which types of contexts matter. This
can be compared to the more established field on contextual explanations
to anti-immigrant attitudes and radical right-wing party support. Theoret-
ical arguments and empirical findings in this field show that the presence
of immigrants can influence attitudes among natives in opposite directions
depending on the type and level of context (e.g. Schlueter and Scheep-
ers 2010; Kaufmann and Harris 2015). Interaction is, once more, key for
these variations. Furthermore, the presence of immigrants in the immediate
surrounding is argued to reduce hostility among natives due to repetitive in-
teractions between groups. Immigrant presence at higher contextual levels
is in turn expected to increase perceptions of threats. This is explained by
the fact that interactions are less frequent in larger spatial contexts, where
individuals instead rely on cues and signals.
What this implies for the research field of contexts and immigrants’ po-
litical integration in general, specifically my dissertation, is the importance
of empirically testing the relevance of spatial and functional contexts. Here,
my first paper contributes by studying countries as a primarily spatial con-
text where the impact is contingent on events and indirect interactions that
send cues about the current state of the national socio-political debate.
In the second paper, I study the contextual influence in school classes as a
mainly functional context where the impact is a function of direct interaction
between students. The third paper centres on individuals’ past collective ex-
periences of discrimination and cues on public and political pro-immigrant
support, thereby capturing both functional and spatial aspect of contexts.
2.2 Anti- and pro-immigrant contexts
Societies can be more or less welcoming and inclusive or hostile and exclusive
towards immigrant groups. While there is seldom a clear tipping point as
to when inclusive contexts turn exclusive, it can be helpful to consider the
contextual scales as unipolar or bipolar. Unipolar scales consist of categories
organised along a continuum, whereas bipolar scales include opposing cate-
gories with positive and negative ends (Ho¨hne et al. 2020). Applied to the
setting of this dissertation, a unipolar scale indicates degrees of contextual
hostility or degrees of pro-immigrant support, for example, the parliamen-
14
2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
tary strength of anti-immigrant parties. The parties can be either strong
or weak, with few or many parliamentary seats. On the contrary, a bipolar
contextual scale includes the full range and opposing ends, with pro- and
anti-immigrant values. For example, attitudes towards immigration, which
can range from positive to negative.
Previous studies on contexts and political integration mainly rely on
unipolar scales of hostility, ranging from less to more hostile. This im-
plies that they theoretically centre only on the negative political effects of
hostility towards immigrants. Measurements of hostility in this field in-
clude, for instance, law proposals that aim to limit immigrants rights to
welfare services (Jones-Correa 2001; Pantoja et al. 2001; Ramakrishnan and
Espenshade 2001) perceptions of discrimination (Maxwell 2009) and anti-
immigrant party strength (Just 2017). Studies that focus theoretically on
the potential positive political effects of pro-immigrant support are limited.
Exceptions include the work by Bennour and Manatschal (2019), which fo-
cuses theoretically on both exclusive and inclusive integration policies and
public attitudes in Swiss cantons. In addition, Just and Anderson (2014)
theoretically address the potential effects of hostile and welcoming contexts
across Europe, measuring contexts using public opinions towards immigra-
tion.
Acknowledging that contexts can range from welcoming to hostile, we
can take one step further in nuance. Societies can be welcoming in some
dimensions and hostile in others. In this dissertation, I primarily focus on
social and political dimensions of contexts. The parliamentary presence of
anti-immigrant parties exemplifies a hostile political context. This hostility
is however not necessarily reflected in the social context, where the general
public can be overall positive towards immigration. This variation in di-
mensions can be illustrated with the example of immigrant hostility raised
in the introduction, namely the electoral success of the Sweden Democrats.
While the party gained electoral support and parliamentary representation,
a majority of Swedish voters were not supportive of their policy proposals.
In fact, there was a massive counter reaction where protesters and politi-
cians stated clearly that they opposed the Sweden Democrats and their
anti-immigrant agenda. Acknowledging these variations in dimensions, the
opening paragraph in the dissertation can be slightly adjusted. While the
electoral success of the Sweden Democrats made immigrants’ in Sweden
15
2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
aware that a significant share of natives favoured anti-immigrant policies, it
was also clear that a vast majority opposed them. This example sheds light
on the complexity in testing the influence of contexts. People are embedded
in several different contexts, and these contexts can include both inclusive
and exclusive expressions.
Taking the complex nature of contexts into account, I empirically and
theoretically cover a large span in the dissertation. Empirically, I include
different types of contexts and scales in the three different papers. I draw the
limit, however, at the higher level of hostility. This maintains that I exclude
anti-immigrant hate crimes or other violent acts. In contemporary liberal
democracies, racist violence and hate crimes constitutes a strong norm vi-
olation. In other words, while it surely exists, it violates prevalent norms
rather than represents prevalent norms in the context. My scope condition
is thereby European liberal democracies, where human rights in general are
protected against organized violence. In this sense, I focus on the narrower
scale of hostility where the most extreme events are excluded.
In the first paper, I test the cross-national influence of attitudes towards
immigration (measured using a bipolar scale) and anti-immigrant party par-
liamentary strength (measured using a unipolar scale). I hereby test both
social and political contexts, using both types of scales. The second paper
also centers on attitudes towards immigration, but this time among peers in
school classes. This paper is primarily about the social context, using a bipo-
lar attitudinal scale as contextual measurement. In the third paper, I test
the effect of experiences of discrimination, pro-immigrant attitudes and leg-
islation aiming to increase equality for immigrant groups. These contextual
measurements constitute a mix of both social and political contexts, mainly
unipolar scales. Theoretically, I focus primarily on the anti-immigrant part
of the scale in the first two studies, centring on the effects of contextual
hostility. In the third study, I expand the focus to also include the potential
positive effects of pro-immigrant support.
2.3 Political integration
Political integration encompasses a variety of subjective and objective mea-
surements, including knowledge of political issues (Harder et al. 2018), trust
in political institutions (Maxwell 2013), feelings of national belonging (Nor-
ris and Puranen 2019) and political engagement (Harder et al. 2018; Brats-
16
2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
berg et al. 2021). Capturing a substantial part of this range, the individual
papers of my dissertation focus on both subjective and objective aspects of
political integration, namely: electoral participation (paper one), feelings of
national belonging (paper two and three), and political trust (paper three).
These are three related but distinct outcomes that are essential for the so-
ciety in various ways.
Electoral participation is commonly perceived as a key aspect of political
integration. It is an engagement that is per definition directed towards the
new country of residency, unlike some other forms of political engagement.
Electoral participation can thereby be seen as a proxy for other aspects of
political integration since it requires knowledge of the current state of the
national debate (Bratsberg et al. 2021). The fact that immigrants make
up a significant part of the population in many of the receiving countries
also indicates the importance of immigrants’ electoral participation to en-
sure equal input in the political system. However, according to previous
research, there is a participation gap; immigrants that are eligible to vote
are considerably less likely to vote then natives (e.g. Ba¨ck and Soininen
1998; Jime´nez 2011). This is problematic since low political engagement,
as mentioned, can bias public policy against immigrant preferences (Vernby
2013).
In addition to the behavioural aspect of voting, I am also interested in
the psychological processes that relate to a more subjective sense of belong-
ing to the political community. While the possibility to vote generally is
limited to citizens, subjective political integration concerns all residents re-
gardless of citizenship status. Following the work of Maxwell (2010), Norris
and Puranen (2019), and Simonsen (2021a), among others, I here focus on
two different but related measurements of subjective political integration:
feelings of national belonging and political trust. National belonging can
be defined in various ways, but commonly refers to a subjective sense of
attachment towards the national community (Huddy and Khatib 2007).3 In
3National belonging can also be considered a psychological component of integration,
as classified by Harder et al. (2018).
17
2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
current times where multiculturalism is increasing, theorists of liberal na-
tionalism argue that national identities (or belonging) function as a ‘glue’
that holds culturally diverse societies together (Miller and Ali 2014). Soci-
eties where all residents - i.e. natives and immigrants - feel belonging to the
nation are thereby better equipped to handle potential problems following
diversity, since it provides an overarching and uniting shared identity. Na-
tional belonging is, in other words, a significant predictor for social cohesion
of the political society at large.
Examining political trust, I primarily center on trust in political insti-
tutions. This can be defined as ‘the expectation that political institutions
operate according to fair rules even in the absence of constant scrutiny’
(Marien 2011). Trust in political institutions is more general than trust in
political actors. If people distrust political actors, they can simply vote them
out in the next election. People should however be able to trust political
institutions since these are generally considered as the basic pillars of society
(Marien 2011; Norris 2017). Distrust in political institutions thereby indi-
cates dissatisfaction for the society at large. In addition, scholars argue that
trust in political institutions influence other individual attitudes towards the
political society, such as the willingness to accept and comply with political
decisions (Levi and Stoker 2000; Marien and Hooghe 2011). Political trust
is therefore essential in itself and also has important implications for other
political attitudes.
2.4 Symbolic and material values as causal mechanisms
Exposure to anti- or pro-immigrant contexts is one of many forms of personal
experiences that can shape an individual’s political attitudes and behaviour.
In this dissertation, I centre on two well-established theoretical frameworks
that generate insights into the link between contexts and behaviour: social
identity theory and theories of realistic interest. As mentioned, they respec-
tively focus on symbolic and material values of the immigrant group, where
anti- and pro-immigrant contexts can provide distinct threats or benefits.
The notion of a symbolic value originates from social identity theory
(Tajfel and Turner 1979) and its off-shoot, self-categorization theory (Turner
et al. 1987). According to these perspectives individuals strive for a positive
social identity, which can be achieved by favourable comparisons between
one’s own in-group and a relevant out-group. The relativity implies that
18
2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
the value of a group is determined by the social context rather than spe-
cific group features, where the context signals cues about the individual and
group position in comparison to other groups (Ellemers et al. 2002). The
mechanism related to realistic interest theories is, in turn, rather straight
forward and centres on protecting shared material interests (Bobo 1983;
Huddy 2013).4
Comparing the two mechanisms, a symbolic threat is something that
challenges the status of the group relative to other groups, which, in the
setting of this dissertation, is understood as the status of the immigrant
minority group relative to the native majority. A current example of a sym-
bolic threat is the debate on burqa bans across Europe, including the recent
referendum in Switzerland. In this referendum, a majority voted in favour
of banning face coverings in public (BBC 2021). This debate in general, and
the major public support specifically, sends a symbolic signal of exclusion
to the Muslim minority.
On the contrary, a material threat relates to instances where anti-immigrant
contexts provide distinct threats to the individual or group material inter-
ests. This can occur when immigrants are, for example, unfairly prevented
from employment or housing. In addition, material (and symbolic) threats
may induce a sense of society as unjust (Stroebe et al. 2011; Schaafsma
2013), which can render the individual to perceive the government as un-
able to ensure equal status between natives and minority groups (Michelson
2003).
On the other side of the spectrum, pro-immigrant contexts can signal
symbolic benefits in terms of favourable comparisons that increases the value
of a minority identity. Interactions or cues that signal that the immigrant
group is valued can thereby induce a sense of belonging with the society
at large. In line with social identity theory, people who feel included be-
4There is not necessarily a clear distinction between the two mechanisms, several types
of anti-or pro-immigrant contexts constitute both a symbolic and materialistic threat or
benefits; discrimination for instance relates to the value of an individuals’ group but also
has direct economic implications.
19
2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
come more positive towards the group and its members. In addition, pro-
immigrant support can signal material values by providing material gains
that benefit interests on both the individual and group levels. Such ma-
terial gains include, for instance, initiatives of affirmative action aiming to
improve the representation of immigrant groups in the labour market.
Drawing on these theories, the main expectations in the dissertation are
that anti-immigrant contexts have a negative effect on immigrants’ political
trust and feelings of national belonging, whereas pro-immigrant contexts
have a positive effect. An additional argument, while not tested empirically
in this dissertation, is that the mechanisms affect the outcomes in different
ways. I propose that the mechanism related to the social identity theory
primarily influences immigrants’ feelings of national belonging, by limiting
or increasing the possibility to feel included in the political society of the
majority group. A material threat or gain may instead foremost relate to
political trust, considering political institutions have the power to influence
access to material goods.
In contrast to the expectations regarding political trust and national
belonging, the expectations related to hostility towards immigrants and po-
litical participation are more conflicting. Hostility can be hypothesised to
either mobilise or demobilise political participation. By threatening the
symbolic or material value of the immigrant group, individuals can react by
either withdrawing from the political society or engaging to raise the group
status or secure material interests (Ellemers et al. 2002; Simonsen 2021b).
The direction of effect may partly be attributed to individual-level expla-
nations (discussed further below). In addition, it can relate to the type of
anti-immigrant context one faces. According to Oskooii (2016, 2020), mo-
bilisation is most likely to occur when the threat is systematic and group-
oriented, for instance, through discriminatory laws and campaign messages.
Instead, interpersonal and individual threats, where one person discrimi-
nates against another person, is assumed to have a demobilising influence
20
2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
on political engagement.5
The suggested distinction between systematic and interpersonal threats
further highlights the difficulty in clarifying the mechanisms related to sym-
bolic and material threats that drive individual behaviour. While systematic
and group-oriented threats may foremost be considered as material threats,
they can also send cues of symbolic threats towards the value of the group.
This nuance is raised by Simonsen (2021b), who suggests that threats to-
wards immigrants’ material values increase political participation, whereas
threats towards immigrants’ worth and status decrease political participa-
tion. Furthermore, according to Simonsen (2021b), abstention from political
society should not necessarily be interpreted as apathy. Rather, it may be a
strategy to cope with the negative targeting, or taking control by distancing
from the political community itself.
There are, in general, few studies that contrast symbolic and material
threats; however, findings from research on attitudes towards immigration
indicates that symbolic threats have more predictive power than material
threats (Sniderman et al. 2004; Huddy 2013). Specifically related to anti-
immigrant contexts and political trust, Pe´rez (2015) theoretically argues
and empirically finds support for symbolic threats as the causal mechanism,
but does not raise material threats as an additional potential mechanism.
2.5 Heterogeneous effects within the immigrant group
Moving forward from the discussion of why anti-or pro-immigrant contexts
are expected to influence political integration, I now turn to the composition
of the immigrant group. This is a widely varied group where we can expect
heterogeneous effects of contextual hostility. Firstly, we know that the de-
gree to which immigrants are targeted by anti-immigrant attitudes to some
extent varies as a function of their region of origin. In Europe, non-Western
immigrants are more exposed to anti-immigrant expressions than Western
5The distinctions by Oskooii (2016, 2020) only concerns acts of discrimination; how-
ever, it could reasonably apply to other forms of anti-immigrant contexts as well.
21
2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
immigrants (Rydgren 2004; Hangartner et al. 2021). These differences may
partly be attributed to the rhetoric of anti-immigrant parties, who often
single out immigrants from Muslim countries as the main problem (Zaslove
2004; Rydgren 2008). Individuals born in Africa or Asia are, therefore, at
greater risk of being exposed to anti-immigrant contexts, since the actual
rhetoric tends to categorise them as belonging to the Muslim population
regardless of their religious affiliation. In relation to this, the strength of
symbolic and material threats depends on the salience of a minority group
position; an individual must be targeted by the threat in order to react to
it. I, therefore, argue that anti-immigrant contexts mainly influence indi-
viduals within the most targeted group, rather than all individuals with an
immigrant background, or only Muslims.
Secondly, the targeted immigrant group theoretically consists of immi-
grants as well as those who are native-born with immigrant parents, the
so-called first and second-generation of immigrants, respectively. While the
second generation have not migrated themselves, anti-immigrant expressions
generally tend to disregard such distinctions, targeting individuals with di-
rect and indirect migrant backgrounds. The first general expectation is,
therefore, that anti-immigrant contexts can influence the attitudes and be-
haviour among both first- and second-generation immigrants.
Distinguishing within the group further, however, there are contrasting
theoretical expectations regarding how immigrants ‘should’ be influenced
depending on their level of integration. The assimilation theory expects
subsequent generations of immigrants, or immigrants who have lived longer
in the host country, to converge with natives in terms of identity and socio-
political attitudes (Alba and Nee 1997; Michelson 2003). The ‘paradox of
social integration’ theory in contrast posits that the second generation of im-
migrants will be more aware of discrimination, and therefore react stronger
to unjust treatment and prejudice than the first generation (Michelson 2003;
Heath and Demireva 2014; Platt 2014; Verkuyten 2016, see also Lajevardi
et al. 2020). Applied to the framework of this dissertation, the assimilation
theory would expect the political attitudes and behaviour of the second gen-
eration, or immigrants who have lived longer in the host society, to resemble
that of natives. Exposure to anti-immigrant contexts would thus have a
weaker impact, since those who are more integrated are assumed to iden-
tify less with their immigrant background. The social integration paradox
22
2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
would, in contrast, posit the second generation or immigrants who have lived
longer in the country to react stronger to anti-immigrant contexts than the
first generation or newly arrived, turning away from the host society rather
than integrate into it.
Lastly, drawing further on social identity theory, we can expect the indi-
vidual response to anti-immigrant contexts to vary depending on the level of
commitment to the identity of the targeted group. For the sake of simplicity,
I here refer to the immigrant group as the group identity (see e.g. Simonsen
2018, 2021b). This could also be more nuanced in terms of, for instance,
national or regional groups. Two further clarifications about identity and
group commitment are in order here. Firstly, group identity can either be
adopted by choice (acquired or avowed) or attributed by others (ascribed)
(Collier 1997; Huddy 2013). Secondly, identity refers to the content of the
identity, whereas commitment indicates the individual’s strength of ties with
that identity (Ellemers et al. 2002; see Huddy 2013 for similar distinction).
This implies that a person can be part of a social group without feeling com-
mitted to the group. Taking these two aspects into consideration, the level
of commitment to a group is likely to be stronger in those cases an identity
is acquired rather than ascribed by others (Collier 1997; Huddy 2013).
The overall takeaway here is that individuals can be members of groups
that they do not feel strongly committed to. In addition, the nature of the
response is likely to differ depending on the level of commitment. Individ-
uals who do not feel any sense of belonging to the immigrant group are
not expected to react to threats towards the group based on group identity,
since the threat is not perceived to concern them. For individuals who feel a
low commitment to the immigrant group and are exposed to anti-immigrant
contexts, a way to increase self-esteem is to leave the group and climb the
social ladder. Related to the aspects of political integration included in this
dissertation, an initial expectation would be for low-committed individuals
to react to anti-immigrant contexts by decreasing their identification with
the immigrant group while emphasising their belonging with the native host
society and/or engaging in the political arena to signal societal inclusion.
However, the possibility for low-committed individuals to leave their so-
cial group and strive for a more highly valued group membership to some
extent depends on external labelling; you may have difficulties leaving the
group if others perceive you as being part of the group, for instance due to
23
2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
skin color or cultural practices (Tajfel and Turner 1979; Huddy 2013). This
implies that those who are most likely to be targeted by anti-immigrant
contexts also are those who have the least possibility to leave the identity of
the immigrant group and join the native host society. In order to increase
self-esteem, their reactions may instead be to withdraw from the political
society (i.e. decreased feelings of national belonging, trust and participa-
tion) and, if possible, seek the identity of another positively valued group.
In contrast, individuals who feel highly committed to their group are more
likely to react with collective action, attempting to raise their group sta-
tus and consequently the status of the individual (Tajfel and Turner 1979;
Piontkowski et al. 2000; Ellemers et al. 2002). In terms of political integra-
tion, this is likely to result in decreased national belonging and trust, but
increased political participation as a means of collective action.
As discussed further in the following sections, I am able to empirically
address the first two theoretical distinctions related to immigrant origin and
integration levels in the individual papers of the dissertation. In the first pa-
per, I test the influence of anti-immigrant contexts on political participation
among immigrants with African and Asian backgrounds. In addition, I run
robustness tests on the wider immigrant group. In the second paper, I test
the assimilation theory and paradox of social integration by comparing the
influence of anti-immigrant contexts between first- and second-generation
immigrants within the same cohort. In the third paper, I also address the
variations in effect depending on integration levels, comparing the effect
of discrimination and pro-immigrant support within first-generation immi-
grants with varying time spent in the country. The final discussion regarding
the level of group commitment is not analysed within the dissertation, but
rather aims to theoretically shed light on the various ways in which the in-
dividual response can differ between and within low- and high-committed
groups.
24
3 RESEARCH DESIGN
3 Research design
The layout of the research design addresses the issues raised in the theo-
retical framework outlined above. The aim is to capture different relevant
aspects within each paper so that the three papers in combination answer
the overarching research question of this dissertation: how are immigrants’
political integration influenced by anti- or pro-immigrant contexts? The first
part of this section discusses the data used, and the second goes into the
methodological choices. A more detailed description of the research design
and methods within each paper is provided in section four, where I briefly
summarise the individual papers.
3.1 Data
One of the challenges of the dissertation, and for the field overall, has been
to find reliable data that cover anti- and pro-immigrant contexts and im-
migrant’s political attitudes and behaviour. Surveys on political attitudes
and behaviour generally have difficulties reaching out to the immigrant pop-
ulation (Couper and De Leeuw 2003; Feskens et al. 2006). The number of
immigrant respondents in most surveys are therefore usually low and often
consists of European rather than non-European-born immigrants. In other
words, most surveys on political attitudes and behaviour do not cover my
main population of interest. For the first two studies of the dissertation, I
use data from two established cross-national surveys that have managed to
gain a diverse and representative sample of the immigrant group: the Eu-
25
3 RESEARCH DESIGN
ropean Social Survey (ESS) and the International Civic and Citizen Educa-
tion Study (ICCS). Apart from being acknowledged as reliable, these data
sources are advantageous since they include a large sample of individuals and
detailed information that enables distinguishing between respondents with
immigrant and native origin. In addition, they cover measurements that
capture subjective and objective components of political integration. For
the third paper, I collect my own data by distributing a survey experiment
through targeted advertisements on Facebook. This approach has been used
previously in experimental work to study political behaviour among other
specific subgroups (Hirano et al. 2015; Ja¨ger 2017; Marble et al. 2021); how-
ever, to the best of my knowledge, this is the first to use Facebook adver-
tisements as a tool to recruit immigrant respondents. The combination of
these three data sources enables me to empirically analyze different types of
contexts and heterogeneous effects within the immigrant group.
For the contextual variation, I argue for the importance of including
both functional and spatial contexts. Taking into consideration that indi-
viduals are nested in the political and social environment of the national
state (Koopmans 2004), the first paper focuses on a cross-country compari-
son. Here, I make use of the variation in attitudes and anti-immigrant party
presence between European countries, thereby capturing both societal and
political forms of anti-immigrant contexts. Data on attitudes towards immi-
gration come from the ESS, and data on anti-immigrant party parliamentary
presence from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and the Parliaments and gov-
ernments database.
Capturing the interaction mechanism that is significant for functional
contexts, I make use of ICCS survey questions on attitudes towards immi-
gration in school classes in the second paper. Furthermore, I test how the
attitudes among peers correlate with immigrant youths’ feelings of national
belonging. The functional approach is novel in the research field of anti-
immigrant contexts and political beliefs. As mentioned, previous studies
mainly apply spatial approaches with national or regional boundaries where
the contextual impact depend on space and place, rather than direct in-
teractions (e.g. Jones-Correa 2001; Pantoja et al. 2001; Just and Anderson
2014). The use of attitudes in school classes instead addresses the functional
aspect of contexts, since school classes are close environments where youths
interact on a daily basis.
26
3 RESEARCH DESIGN
Lastly, data in the third paper come from a survey experiment in two na-
tional contexts, Sweden and Germany. To test the causal effect of anti- and
pro-immigrant expressions, respondents were randomly assigned to three dif-
ferent treatments: discrimination, pro-immigrant support, or control. These
treatments capture both spatial and functional contextual components. Re-
spondents assigned to the discrimination treatment are primed with ques-
tions on unfair treatment towards the Arabic group. This treatment mainly
centre on the interactions between immigrants and the host society. Those
assigned to the pro-immigrant condition are primed with facts about positive
attitudes and political support for immigrants’ rights. These facts primarily
capture the spatial components of contexts, indicating cues about public
and political preferences.
For the heterogeneous effects within the immigrant group, the data
sources included enable me to capture several different types of variations. In
the first study, the ESS data makes it possible to focus on those immigrants
who are mainly targeted, namely non-Western immigrants from Africa or
Asia. In addition, I am able to compare the contextual effects between non-
Western immigrants and natives. I also include further robustness tests on
the wider immigrant group. This is important to test my argument that the
effect mainly concerns those who are targeted by anti-immigrant attitudes,
rather than all immigrants.
In the second study, I use the ICCS data to test the contrasting theo-
retical expectations regarding the influence of anti-immigrant contexts on
first- and second-generation immigrant youths. Since the data is drawn
from youths within the 8th or 9th grade, I am able to compare the gener-
ational effects within the same cohort. This approach limits the risk that
unobserved confounders drive the results, which is present when comparing
between different age groups. To test whether the effect only exists among
immigrants, I also run robustness tests among natives.
Lastly, for my own data collection, I target the advertisement to Face-
book users with Arabic language settings in Sweden and Germany. In addi-
tion to honing in on one of the most targeted groups, I capture variations in
time spent in the country. Roughly half of the sample arrived in Sweden or
Germany from Syria during the so-called refugee crisis in 2014–2016. There-
fore, I am able to analyse the political attitudes within the most recently
arrived immigrant group, and compare them to those who have lived longer
27
3 RESEARCH DESIGN
in the country.
3.2 Methods
The first and second papers of the dissertation are cross-sectional obser-
vation studies and the third paper is a survey experiment. Therefore, the
first two papers show patterns of correlations between contexts and political
integration. However, the third paper delves deeper into the question of
causation to determine whether there is a causal effect beyond correlations.
While describing how the methodological approaches of the dissertation fit
the theoretical framework, I can also address some of the most commonly
raised criticisms towards contextual analyses: ecological fallacy and selec-
tion bias.
Firstly, I am interested in studying how individuals are influenced by
their surrounding environment, and, to some extent, how this influence
varies between individuals. The problem with ecological fallacy exists when
individual-level inferences are erroneously drawn based on aggregated data
(Robinson 2009). However, this risk is less prevalent in my papers since I rely
on individual level data for the outcome variables. In the first and second
papers, I apply multilevel regression modelling. Here I include the individ-
ual and contextual level characteristics within the same analysis and interact
the two levels (cross-level interaction) in order to compare the contextual
influence between individuals. The third paper only relies on individual
data, testing the experimental effects of discrimination and pro-immigrant
support across treatment groups.
Secondly, I want to determine how contexts influence individuals, rather
than why individuals with certain characteristics choose to live and be part
of certain contexts. The first is a contextual effect, whereas the second is
an effect of self-selection where people sort into contexts (Huckfeldt and
Sprague 1993), for instance, by choosing to live in certain neighbourhoods
or attending certain organisations. Conclusions of contextual effects based
on the second condition indicate selection bias. The issue with self-selection
is a potential problem for most contextual analyses; however, the extent of
the problem varies depending on the setting (Huckfeldt and Sprague 1993).
In other words, to what extent do people choose their location or interac-
tions based on the specific contextual characteristics of interest? Within
the setting of this dissertation, this degree of likelihood varies between the
28
3 RESEARCH DESIGN
individual papers.
I would say that the focus on countries in the first paper bears the high-
est risk of selection bias. It is plausible to assume that immigrants move
to a specific country due to the societal and political context. However, it
is perhaps quite likely that there are other factors that play more impor-
tant roles, such as the possibility to stay and whether family or friends have
migrated to the same country (also possibly related to the societal and polit-
ical context). Considering the second paper that centers on school classes,
I assume the self-selection effect to be significantly less present. Parents
and students are more likely to choose schools based on aspects such as the
quality of teaching and geographic proximity rather than the attitudinal cli-
mate among peers. Lastly, the third paper is based on a survey experiment,
where respondents are randomly assigned to treatment and control groups,
leaving no room for self-selection into a certain context. Overall, although
I cannot completely rule out the risk of selection bias, I move further away
from the problem for each paper within the dissertation.
The last methodological consideration relates to the outcome measure-
ments. Here I use self-reported measures for the outcome variables in all
three papers. To ensure these are valid, I rely on measurements that are
commonly used in the established literature on political attitudes and be-
haviour. The potential problem with self-reported measurements mainly
relates to the first study where I focus on voting. There is a risk of over
reporting when measuring voting shares using self-reported measurements,
since the vote share in surveys usually exceeds the actual turnout. This
is partly due to the overrepresentation of politically engaged respondents
in election survey samples (Granberg and Holmberg 1991; Dahlberg and
Persson 2014). In addition, it concerns vote misreporting. People can be
influenced by social desirability and therefore state that they voted even if
they did not (Selb and Munzert 2013). In order to address this, I control for
the individual-level factors that previous findings have shows to be related
to the tendency to be dishonest about nonvoting (Granberg and Holmberg
1991). I thereby decrease the potential risk that over reporting systemati-
cally influences the results.
29
3 RESEARCH DESIGN
3.3 Ethical considerations
This dissertation is about immigrants, primarily non-Western immigrants.
In this context, non-Western immigrants can be considered as a vulnera-
ble group of individuals. According to Moore and Miller (1999), vulnerable
persons include those persons who are, individually or as part of a group,
stigmatised, excluded or have limited control over their lives. Many non-
Western immigrants have experienced forced migration. Some lack the for-
mal or informal requirements necessary to fully participate in society, such
as citizenship or language skills. Immigrant youths can, moreover, be consid-
ered as doubly vulnerable. As both immigrants and minors, they experience
more than one factor that diminishes autonomy (Moore and Miller 1999).
When conducting research on vulnerable individuals, it is especially im-
portant to apply ethically sound strategies. Quantitative research is gener-
ally perceived to pose less ethical challenges than qualitative research, since
interview situations provide more of a hierarchical nature in the relationship
between the researcher and the research subjects (Van Liempt and Bilger
2012). The empirical findings in this dissertation all rely on quantitative
research. In addition, I use quantitative data from well-established and re-
liable survey organisations in the first two studies.
The main ethical consideration in the dissertation concerns the third
study, where I collect my own data and randomly expose respondents to
experimental treatments. The first question to consider here is whether the
benefits of the research outweigh the risks of participation. Here I estimated
that the benefit of studying the political effects of discrimination and pro-
immigrant support on a group that is heavily underrepresented in research
outweighs the potential risks of participation. In order to minimise potential
harm, I took several precautions. First, the study was tested and approved
by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (DNR 2020-02166). Second, re-
spondents were informed about the project and their rights as participants
and obtained their consent to participate before starting the survey.
Third, I tried to keep my experimental treatment of discrimination as
unobtrusive as possible. This precaution was the one with the most sig-
nificant impact on how the study was conducted. The treatment relies on
primes of past collective experiences of discrimination, using similar phras-
ing as in previous surveys on discrimination (Shariff-Marco et al. 2011; Kuo
et al. 2017). This approach is in contrast to other experimental work re-
30
3 RESEARCH DESIGN
lated to anti-immigrant expressions (e.g. Pe´rez 2015; Hopkins et al. 2018),
where respondents are shown vignettes with facts about discrimination to-
wards ethnic groups or xenophobic political rhetoric. This approach bears
a higher risk of shaping the respondents’ perceptions of the host country’s
society and potentially causing long-term negative effects. Although my
design turned out not to be the most ideal way to test the effect of discrim-
ination, I perceived it to be the most ethically sound.
As a fourth precaution, I used real facts for the treatment priming pro-
immigrant support. These facts were gathered from various sources, includ-
ing the Pew Research Center (2019) and the ESS. Fifth and last, respon-
dents’ identities are kept anonymous throughout the process. I hereby abide
by the four guidelines of ethical standards: informed consent, privacy and
confidentiality, non-deception, and accuracy (Van Liempt and Bilger 2012).
31
4 DESCRIPTIONS OF INDIVIDUAL PAPERS
4 Descriptions of individ-
ual papers
In this section, I briefly summarise the papers included in the dissertation.
At the end of the section, Table 2 illustrate the twelve gaps, how my disser-
tation contributes by addressing ten of them in the respective papers, and
what the main findings are.
4.1 Paper 1: Immigrants’ electoral participation – The
cross-national impact of public and political hostil-
ity
The first paper of the dissertation (Tyrberg 2019)6 focuses on the rela-
tion between anti-immigrant contexts on the national (spatial) level and
voting in Europe. Building on prior work on contexts and voting within
the United States, I test the expectation that political and societal anti-
immigrant contexts have a mobilising influence on citizens with African or
Asian backgrounds. The societal aspect of contexts is measured using atti-
6Published in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
32
4 DESCRIPTIONS OF INDIVIDUAL PAPERS
tudes, where a bipolar scale indicates positive or negative attitudes towards
immigrants. The political context is captured with anti-immigrant party
parliamentary strength. This is measured using the share of seats held
by an anti-immigrant party in the national parliament. The parliamentary
presence of anti-immigrant parties is, as mentioned, a previously unexplored
but highly relevant aspect of anti-immigrant contexts in relation to voting.
Their representation in parliaments signals that anti-immigrant attitudes
are legitimised in the political sphere. In countries where anti-immigrant
parties have a stronger parliamentary presence, immigrants are more likely
to feel excluded from the political society.7
I use cross-level interactions to compare the contextual effect between
citizens with immigrant background and natives. I thereby address the po-
tential problems in previous research where the impact of anti-immigrant
contexts is tested on the immigrant group in isolation (eg. Jones-Correa
2001; Just and Anderson 2014; Pe´rez 2015). By comparing the contextual
effect between groups, I am able to test the potential difference in influence
on immigrants in relation to natives. This is in contrast to analyses of only
immigrants, which may hide a more general impact than what is theorised
and potentially result in misleading conclusions.
Using multilevel logistic regression models on individual and contextual
data in 28 European countries, I find higher electoral participation among
immigrants in comparison to natives in countries with higher degrees of anti-
immigrant attitudes. Comparing the difference in odds of voting between
countries with low and medium degrees of public contextual hostility, my
study indicates a slight positive effect on immigrants’ voting in relation to
natives in countries with higher degrees of anti-immigrant attitudes. As
expected, and related to the variation within the immigrant group, the ten-
dencies of a mobilising impact are absent when running robustness tests on
a wider group, including all immigrants. This strengthens the theoretical
7This assumption is supported by qualitative findings from Simonsen (2021a), where
interviews with non-Western immigrants in Denmark show that the respondents were well
aware of the negative rhetoric towards immigrants among Danish politicians.
33
4 DESCRIPTIONS OF INDIVIDUAL PAPERS
argument of heterogeneous effects, wherein immigrants who are influenced
are those who are mainly targeted.
The mobilising tendencies on immigrants’ electoral participation are,
however, not shown in countries with the highest levels of anti-immigrant
attitudes, suggesting a curvilinear effect. This non-linear relationship may
be explained by a limited opportunity structure where hostility is at its
highest (Koopmans 2004; Just and Anderson 2014). Unexpectedly, I find no
indications of a mobilising effect when measuring political contexts with the
parliamentary representation of anti-immigrant parties. The implications of
this result are discussed further in the summary section.
An additional important finding is that there is a negative effect of anti-
immigrant attitudes on voting among natives. This is unexpected, since
I assumed contextual hostility to only influence individuals within the tar-
geted group. While I can only speculate as to why public contextual hostility
decreases natives’ electoral participation, it may relate to perceptions of a
polarised society. This can, in turn, depress electoral turnout. Theorising
and investigating further why natives are influenced and if there is potential
variation in contextual effects within the native group provides an interest-
ing avenue for future research. Moreover, the finding further underlines the
relevance of comparing the impact of hostility between groups.
4.2 Paper 2: Support for the political community in a
community that doesn’t support you: Immigrant
youths’ exposure to anti-immigrant attitudes
Moving from large spatial contexts to functional fine-grained contexts, the
second paper (Tyrberg 2021)8 studies the influence of anti-immigrant atti-
tudes within immigrant youths’ school classes. These are close environments
where youths spend most of their day. This suggests that if anti-immigrant
attitudes exist in the class room, students are likely to encounter them. In
this paper, I thereby focus on the interactions and the ‘everyday’ form of
8Published in Journal of Youth Studies.
34
4 DESCRIPTIONS OF INDIVIDUAL PAPERS
hostility that immigrant youths face to various degrees in their fine-grained
surrounding.
Studying national pride as a measurement of feelings of national be-
longing and political community support, I expect lower pride among im-
migrant youths in school classes with higher levels of anti-immigrant at-
titudes. In addition, I test the variation in contextual influence between
first - and second-generation immigrants within the same cohort. I raise
the two rivalling hypotheses in line with the assimilation theory (Alba and
Nee 1997) and the paradox of social integration (Heath and Demireva 2014;
Platt 2014; Verkuyten 2016), respectively. I thereby expect the influence
of anti-immigrant contexts to be either weaker or non-existing among the
second generation where the immigrant identity is less salient, or stronger
among the second generation in comparison to the first generation as a re-
sult of heightened awareness of discriminating structures.
I set the study in Sweden; a country characterised by a high share of
immigrant reception during the last decades. The attitudes towards immi-
grants in Sweden are, in general, positive as compared to other European
countries (Hainmueller and Hiscox 2007), and Sweden was for long an ex-
ception to the electoral success of anti-immigrant parties (Dahlstro¨m and
Esaiasson 2013; Rydgren and van der Meiden 2019). There are, however,
differences in anti-immigrant attitudes at the subnational level (Demker
2013). This is further illustrated by the support for the Sweden Democrats,
the biggest anti-immigrant party in Sweden. The party gained parliamen-
tary representation at the subnational level in 1991 before they reached the
national level in 2010. The ICCS data used is gathered in 2009, which means
my study is set in a time period where the salience of the immigration issue
was lower on the national level with a variation on the subnational level. The
high level of immigration, limited political salience for the immigration issue
on the national level and subnational variation in anti-immigrant attitudes
makes Sweden at the time a unique case on which to test the influence of
hostility, where hostility in the micro context to some extent can be isolated
from the national level opinion climate.
Using multilevel linear analyses, I find negative associations between
anti-immigrant attitudes and immigrant youths’ national pride. Immigrant
youths are, in other words, less supportive of the political community if ex-
posed to a more hostile school context. This finding is especially relevant
35
4 DESCRIPTIONS OF INDIVIDUAL PAPERS
considering that the analyses show immigrant youths to have similar levels of
pride as natives in general; the legitimacy problem with low pride thus only
exist in hostile contexts. Comparing the association between anti-immigrant
contexts and pride between immigrant generations within the same cohort,
the correlation is to some extent present also among the second generation
of immigrants. But it is either weaker than among first generation immi-
grants, or non-existing depending on model specification. The empirical
findings are thereby mainly in line with the assimilation theory, indicat-
ing a less far-reaching influence of hostility than expected from the social
integration paradox.
4.3 Paper 3: Integration, Discrimination, and Pro-Immigrant
Support - Surprising Insights from a Survey Exper-
iment in Germany and Sweden
In the third paper, I address both anti- and pro-immigrant contexts by ask-
ing how experiences of discrimination, on the one hand, and expressions
of pro-immigrant support, on the other, influence non-Western immigrants’
political trust and feelings of national belonging. I bring new causal evi-
dence by testing the effect of discrimination and pro-immigrant support in
a survey experiment in two national contexts, Sweden and Germany.9 In
addition, I test whether the treatment effects are conditional on the indi-
vidual’s time spent in the country.
Discrimination is one of the most negative forms of interaction between
immigrants and public or institutional actors in their host society. Within
the research field, observational correlation studies indicate that perceptions
of discrimination decrease political integration (e.g. Maxwell 2009, Heath
and Demireva 2014). Yet, causal evidence is scarce. This is unsatisfactory
as the causal relationship may be reversed, as individuals who are less in-
tegrated can perceive their surrounding environment as more unfair rather
9The study is approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (DNR 2020-02166)
and pre-registered (EGAP Registration ID: 20201016AA)
36
4 DESCRIPTIONS OF INDIVIDUAL PAPERS
than the other way around. Or, there may be a third unobserved factor
that explains both perceptions of the society and political integration. In
order to address these endogeneity issues and isolate potential causal effects
of discrimination, additional experimental evidence is needed.
Expressions of pro-immigrant support are, in contrast to discrimina-
tion, a positive type of encounter between immigrants and public or in-
stitutional actors within the host society. Pro-immigrant support can foster
immigrants’ political integration by increasing the immigrant group’s value.
Whereas research on discrimination and political integration is extensive
but lacking in causal evidence, studies on the effect of pro-immigrant sup-
port are nearly non-existent (see Just and Anderson 2014, and Bennour and
Manatschal 2019 for cross-sectional exceptions).
Following standard experimental procedures to test the hypotheses, I
attempt to prime past collective experiences of discrimination by asking
questions on unfair treatment. Expressions of pro-immigrant support are,
in turn, primed with facts about public and institutional support for immi-
grants’ rights. To distribute the survey experiment, I recruit respondents by
using targeted Facebook advertisements. I hereby contribute with unique
data on political integration among non-Western immigrants who are more
or less established, including recently arrived immigrants. This is a group
that is heavily underrepresented in existing research since traditional sur-
veys normally reach those who have lived longer in the host country.
The results from the survey experiment are in line with expectations
from prior work in some subgroups, and underline the importance of equal
treatment to achieve successful integration. However, the findings also paint
a rather complex picture of discrimination and its psychological impact. To
some extent, the results challenge the causal interpretations of negative cor-
relations between perceived discrimination and integration in observational
studies.
37
4 DESCRIPTIONS OF INDIVIDUAL PAPERS
Table 2: Gaps, contributions and empirical findings
Gap Contribution Finding Paper
1. Causal studies missing Test causality in a survey Equal treatment increases 3
experiment subjective integration, conditional
effect of discrimination and
pro-immigrant support
2. Theoretical focus on the Theoretically and empirically Positive effect of equal treatment, 3
anti- immigrant part of scale address the influence of conditional positive effect of
only pro-immigrant support pro-immigrant support
3. Spatial types of contexts Study functional contexts Attitudes in school classes shape 2
only immigrants’ national belonging
4. Comparing functional and Not addressed empirically - -
spatial contexts
5. Contextual hostility Study contextual hostility and Mobilising impact of public 1
and voting, only in the US voting in Europe hostility on voting
6. Anti-immigrant parties Test influence of anti-immigrant No effect 1
and voting party strength on voting
7. Focus on targeted group Study non-Western immigrants Contextual effect most 1
too broad (or narrow) pronounced within targeted
group
8. Integration effects Compare contextual effect Less integrated mainly 2, 3
missing between generations within the affected by hostility,
same cohort, and within only more integrated affected
the first generation by pro-immigrant support
9. Highly integrated Use Facebook ads to attract Newly arrived immigrants 3
immigrants only newly arrived immigrants are negatively affected
by experiences of discrimination
10. Comparison of causal Not addressed empirically - -
mechanisms missing
11. Contextual effect tested Compare contextual effect Demobilizing influence on natives’ 1, 2
among immigrants only between immigrants and voting, no effect on
natives national belonging
12. Immigrant adults only Study immigrant youths Lower national belonging among 2
youths in more hostile school
classes
38
5 SUMMARY, LIMITATIONS, AND FUTURE AVENUES OF
RESEARCH
5 Summary, limitations, and
future avenues of research
The empirical findings of the dissertation are partly in line with previous
work; however, it also provides new and unexpected insights. My main
claim guiding this dissertation is that social and political contexts are un-
derstudied but highly relevant aspects in explaining immigrants’ political
integration. Underlining this claim, I find contextual effects on immigrants’
subjective and objective political integration in all three studies. Moreover,
the empirical findings from my second and third studies indicate that the
contextual measurements are better predictors of political trust and feelings
of national belonging than the individual level predictors related to inte-
gration levels.10 This is a highly relevant contribution to the integration
literature, where previous research has largely centered on individual-level
explanations. The implications for the literature on immigrants’ political
integration is thereby to take the surrounding environment into account in
explaining variations in political attitudes and behaviour.
Examining the different types of contexts, the first two papers show that
10See e.g. Table 3 in paper two and Figure C1 in paper three.
39
5 SUMMARY, LIMITATIONS, AND FUTURE AVENUES OF
RESEARCH
larger national spatial contexts and more fine-grained functional contexts
are significant predictors of voting and feelings of national belonging respec-
tively. These findings indicate that the influence comes from both direct
interactions and through cues and signals that individuals pick up from the
national sphere. Results from the first study also show that anti-immigrant
contexts mainly matter for those who are actually targeted by hostile ex-
pressions, rather than all immigrants, in line with my theoretical argument.
In addition, it works as one potential explanation to the previous contrast-
ing findings of political mobilisation or demobilisation. It is reasonable to
assume that those immigrants who are targeted by hostility are those who
are most likely to respond with political engagement. Future studies should
pay further attention to these heterogeneous effects, acknowledging the large
variation within the immigrant group.
In addition, the dissertation provides two surprising findings. First, re-
sults from the first paper indicate that the parliamentary presence of anti-
immigrant parties does not affect immigrants’ political participation. This
finding somewhat contrasts previous studies measuring anti-immigrant con-
texts in the political sphere, where legislation aiming to limit immigrants’
rights has been found to mobilise political participation in the United States
(Jones-Correa 2001; Pantoja et al. 2001; Ramakrishnan and Espenshade
2001). An important distinction here, however, is that my study focuses
on the party presence rather than anti-immigrant policy proposals. While
anti-immigrant parties can be expected to push immigration policies in a
more restrictive direction, my paper rather touches upon a setting where
anti-immigrant expressions are legitimised in the political sphere. This is
an important aspect of political contexts that should also matter. As ar-
gued by Oskooii (2016, 2020), political mobilisation is most likely to occur
when the threat is group-oriented and systematic, as is the case with anti-
immigrant party parliamentary presence and their rhetoric.
An alternative explanation to the lack of influence may instead relate to
the differences in party characteristics and the degrees of hostility expressed.
The first paper of the dissertation took an important initial step by including
the party presence. Future studies should pay attention to heterogeneous
effects depending on party characteristics and acceptance from mainstream
parties. This would also enable further analyses on potential variations in
responses among the targeted group depending on the type of context, as
40
5 SUMMARY, LIMITATIONS, AND FUTURE AVENUES OF
RESEARCH
discussed by Oskooii (2016, 2020).
The second unexpected finding comes from the survey experiment in
the third paper. In line with standard expectations from previous studies,
I find a negative correlation between discrimination and political integra-
tion when examining the data cross-sectionally. However, when testing the
causal effect experimentally, I only find the hypothesised negative effect of
experiences of discrimination among newly arrived immigrants. This find-
ing corroborates expectations based on the assimilation theory (Alba and
Nee 1997; Michelson 2003), where discrimination is anticipated to mainly
influence those who have spent less time in the host country. However, the
results also raise the question of whether, to some extent, there is a reversed
direction of effects between perceptions of discrimination and political in-
tegration. In other words, whether some individuals who are low in trust
and feelings of national belonging perceive their surrounding environment
as more unfair, rather than the other way around. Alternatively, it may be
that experiences of discrimination are more fixed and salient, and thereby
less open for manipulation. This is a methodological concern that should be
taken into consideration when studying the effects of discrimination further.
The main limitation of this dissertation is perhaps the lack of empirical
analysis of the causal mechanisms. As most previous scholars within this
field, I theoretically argue why contexts should matter for political inte-
gration but do not empirically test the mechanisms. Although difficult to
empirically distinguish between mechanisms, a primary topic for future re-
search is to provide increased understanding as to when and how individuals
will react to anti- or pro-immigrant expressions.
Related to the above, there are some limitations concerning my measure-
ments of the immigrant group. Here I rely on origin or immigrant status
rather than the individual’s own level of commitment to that specific immi-
grant group. To some extent, this is reasonable since studies indicate that
immigrants refer to themselves as ‘immigrants’, or ‘non-natives’ in the host
society (e.g. Simonsen 2018, 2021b). However, while group membership is a
prerequisite for group identity, it does not necessarily entail actual identifi-
cation. In line with social identity theories, we may, therefore, as mentioned
previously, expect the effects of anti- and pro-immigrant contexts shown in
my studies to be more pronounced when examining individuals who iden-
tify strongly with the specific immigrant group (see Pe´rez 2015 for similar
41
5 SUMMARY, LIMITATIONS, AND FUTURE AVENUES OF
RESEARCH
finding on Latino residents in the US).
Another limitation concerns the approach of capturing several types of
contexts and outcomes. This is an attempt to paint a broader picture of the
phenomenon in a research field with considerable gaps on both the indepen-
dent and dependent sides. However, my approach also entails that there is
variation in contexts and types of political integration between the papers.
A relevant avenue for future research is to compare fine-grained functional
and large-scale spatial contexts to determine whether the influence varies
as a function of the type of context. I made the first contribution in the
dissertation by including both these types of contexts individually. The next
step is to enable a comparison between the two on similar outcomes.
Lastly, my scope condition is limited to a narrower scale of hostile expres-
sions, excluding the most extreme forms of hostility, such as racist violence
and hate crimes. It is plausible to assume that more extreme forms of hostil-
ity would influence immigrants’ political integration in a different way than
what is shown in this dissertation.
42
6 CONCLUSIONS
6 Conclusions
I started this dissertation with an expectation that the anti-immigrant so-
ciopolitical contexts in Europe will entail negative long-term consequences
for immigrant residents. The papers of this dissertation empirically show
that there is indeed a need for concern that anti-immigrant contexts nega-
tively shape some types of political integration. However, the conclusions
are more nuanced than this. The results from my first study suggest that
immigrants are not pushed further away from the political society in (mod-
erately) exclusive contexts. Instead, they mobilise and engage in national
elections. Whether they do this as a protest to anti-immigrant attitudes or
as a way to signal inclusion with the majority society, the act in itself is a
sign of, and strengthens, democratic legitimacy.
In terms of the more subjective indicators, the findings of my studies
show that immigrants (in my samples) to a high extent trust the politi-
cal institutions and feel a sense of belonging to the host society. Findings
from the second paper indicate that immigrant youths in Sweden, in gen-
eral, have the same level of feelings of national belonging as natives. The
problems with social cohesion here only exist among immigrant youths in
those school class contexts that are exclusive to immigrants. Moreover, the
results show that this problem decreases within the second generation, in-
dicating less long-term negative effects than suggested by the paradox of
social integration. This variation, depending on time spent in the country,
is also reflected in the third study, where the negative effects of reminders
of discrimination on trust and belonging only exist among the most recently
43
6 CONCLUSIONS
arrived.
While these findings question the theoretical assumptions from the para-
dox of social integration, they render some support for the assimilation the-
ory. From this line of thinking, immigrants’ identities and socio-political
attitudes are expected to converge with natives as their time in the host
country increases. It may be that previous studies that find a stronger
effect within the second generation of immigrants to some extent capture
other confounding variables related to generation, such as country of ori-
gin or reasons for migration. The advantage with my study on immigrant
youths is that I compare the generational effects between individuals within
the same age cohort, limiting the risk of unobserved confounders. Future
studies should further attempt to isolate the effect of immigrant generation
to establish whether my findings can be generalised to other countries and
contexts.
In addition to the sometimes surprisingly high levels of subjective inte-
gration, findings from the second and third papers suggest ways to increase
integration further. The results indicate that immigrants who are part of
contexts where immigrants’ rights are promoted, or where they are reminded
of equal treatment, have higher levels of feelings of national belonging and
political trust. The conclusions are hereby more optimistic than I antic-
ipated from the onset, wherein immigrants pick up not only on discrimi-
nation but also on the absence of discrimination. Moreover, the empirical
findings go beyond the academic setting and bring highly relevant policy
implications for the society at large, highlighting the important role that
the host society plays. Successful integration can be achieved if residents
are treated as equals.
In line with the notion of integration as a two-way process, my disser-
tation contributes by emphasising the more informal social and political
contexts, in addition to the formal structures. This contextual approach is
a valuable supplement to the current efforts to increase integration, where
policy proposals commonly centre on actions directed towards immigrant
individuals. In addition to this, I propose that much more can be done on
the contextual level. Although it is difficult to manage the behaviour of the
general public, measures can be taken to further ensure that representatives
of official authorities act fair in their encounters with immigrants.
Taking this into consideration is particularly important when interacting
44
6 CONCLUSIONS
with newly arrived immigrants. As shown in the third study, experiences of
discrimination negatively shape political trust and feelings of national be-
longing among immigrants who recently arrived. Important to note here is
that these findings come from a sample of respondents where some arrived
in Europe as recently as last year. This means that they are still within
the time period of the ‘integration window’ where interactions with the host
society can have long-term effects on integration. These findings underline
the importance of equal treatment during the migration process, where im-
migrants first encounters with the host society often take place.
As mentioned, the empirical results also indicate a high sense of inclu-
sion with the political society within the highly relevant groups of immigrant
youths and newly arrived immigrants. This is promising for social cohesion,
indicating uniting identities even in diverse societies. Still, immigrants par-
ticipate in the political society to a much lower degree than natives. The
reservoir of support in terms of feelings of national belonging and political
trust should be harnessed to foster integration further. One way to do so
is to consider more ways to encourage immigrants’ political participation.
The subjective sense of inclusion to some extent already exists. This should
be translated to a more objective inclusion in terms of political engagement,
in order to ensure future democratic equality in multicultural societies.
45
REFERENCES
References
Ager, A. and Strang, A. (2008). Understanding integration: A conceptual
framework. Journal of refugee studies, 21(2):166–191.
Alba, R. and Nee, V. (1997). Rethinking assimilation theory for a new era
of immigration. International Migration Review, 31(4):826–874.
Anderson, C. J. (2009). Macropolitics and microbehavior in comparative
politics. In Lichbach, M. I. and Zuckerman, A. S., editors, Comparative
politics: Rationality, culture, and structure, page 314. Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Ba¨ck, H. and Soininen, M. (1998). Immigrants in the political process.
Scandinavian Political Studies, 21(1):29–50.
Beck, P. A. and Jennings, M. K. (1982). Pathways to participation. Amer-
ican Political Science Review, 76(01):94–108.
Bennour, S. and Manatschal, A. (2019). Immigrants’ Feelings of Attach-
ment to Switzerland: Does the Cantonal Context Matter? In Steiner, I.
and Wanner, P., editors, Migrants and Expats: The Swiss Migration and
Mobility Nexus, pages 189–220. Springer.
Bobo, L. (1983). Whites’ opposition to busing: Symbolic racism or realistic
group conflict? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(6):1196.
Bratsberg, B., Ferwerda, J., Finseraas, H., and Kotsadam, A. (2021). How
Settlement Locations and Local Networks Influence Immigrant Political
Integration. American Journal of Political Science, 65(3):551–565.
Brooks, J. W. and Prysby, C. L. (1991). Political Behaviour and the Local
Context. New York: Praeger.
Campbell, D. E. (2013). Social networks and political participation. Annual
Review of Political Science, 16:33–48.
Cho, W. K. T. (1999). Naturalization, socialization, participation: Immi-
grants and (non-) voting. The Journal of Politics, 61(4):1140–1155.
46
REFERENCES
Cho, W. K. T. and Rudolph, T. J. (2008). Emanating political participation:
untangling the spatial structure behind participation. British Journal of
Political Science, 38(2):273–289.
Collier, M. J. (1997). Cultural identity and intercultural communication.
Intercultural communication: A reader, 8:36–44.
Connor, P. (2010). Contexts of immigrant receptivity and immigrant re-
ligious outcomes: The case of Muslims in Western Europe. Ethnic and
Racial Studies, 33(3):376–403.
Couper, M. P. and De Leeuw, E. D. (2003). Nonresponse in cross-cultural
and cross-national surveys. Cross-cultural survey methods, pages 157–177.
Dahlberg, S. and Persson, M. (2014). Different Surveys, Different Results?
A Comparison of Two Surveys on the 2009 European Parliamentary Elec-
tion. West European Politics, 37(1):204–221.
Dahlstro¨m, C. and Esaiasson, P. (2013). The immigration issue and anti-
immigrant party success in Sweden 1970-2006: A deviant case analysis.
Party Politics, 19(2):343–364.
Demker, M. (2013). Stora regionala skillnader i attityden till flyktingar. In
Svensk migrationspolitisk opinion 1991-2012. SOM-institutet.
Easton, D. (1975). A re-assessment of the concept of political support.
British Journal of Political Science, 5(4):435–457.
Eckstein, K., Noack, P., and Gniewosz, B. (2012). Attitudes toward po-
litical engagement and willingness to participate in politics: Trajectories
throughout adolescence. Journal of Adolescence, 35(3):485–495.
Ellemers, N., Spears, R., and Doosje, B. (2002). Self and social identity.
Annual review of psychology, 53(1):161–186.
Eurostat Statistics Explained (2019). Non-national popula-
tion by group of citizenship, 1 January 2019. Available at
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php.
47
REFERENCES
Fennema, M. and Tillie, J. (1999). Political participation and political trust
in Amsterdam: civic communities and ethnic networks. Journal of Ethnic
and Migration Studies, 25(4):703–726.
Ferwerda, J., Finseraas, H., and Bergh, J. (2020). Voting rights and immi-
grant incorporation: Evidence from Norway. British Journal of Political
Science, 50(2):713–730.
Feskens, R., Hox, J., Lensvelt-Mulders, G., and Schmeets, H. (2006). Col-
lecting data among ethnic minorities in an international perspective. Field
methods, 18(3):284–304.
Fouka, V. (2019). How do immigrants respond to discrimination? The case
of Germans in the US during World War I. American Political Science
Review, 113(2):405–422.
Granberg, D. and Holmberg, S. (1991). Self-reported turnout and voter
validation. American Journal of Political Science, 35(2):448–459.
Hainmueller, J., Hangartner, D., and Pietrantuono, G. (2015). Naturaliza-
tion fosters the long-term political integration of immigrants. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(41):12651–12656.
Hainmueller, J. and Hiscox, M. J. (2007). Educated preferences: Explain-
ing attitudes toward immigration in Europe. International organization,
61(2):399–442.
Hangartner, D., Kopp, D., and Siegenthaler, M. (2021). Monitoring
hiring discrimination through online recruitment platforms. Nature,
589(7843):572–576.
Harder, N., Figueroa, L., Gillum, R. M., Hangartner, D., Laitin, D. D., and
Hainmueller, J. (2018). Multidimensional measure of immigrant integra-
tion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(45):11483–
11488.
Heath, A. and Demireva, N. (2014). Has multiculturalism failed in Britain?
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37(1):161–180.
48
REFERENCES
Hirano, S., Lenz, G. S., Pinkovskiy, M., and Snyder Jr, J. M. (2015). Voter
learning in state primary elections. American Journal of Political Science,
59(1):91–108.
Ho¨hne, J. K., Krebs, D., and Ku¨hnel, S.-M. (2020). Measuring income (in)
equality: Comparing survey questions with unipolar and bipolar scales in
a probability-based online panel. Social Science Computer Review.
Hopkins, D. J., Kaiser, C. R., Pe´rez, E. O., Haga´, S., Ramos, C., and Za´rate,
M. (2018). Does Perceiving Discrimination Influence Partisanship among
US Immigrant Minorities? Evidence from Five Experiments. Journal of
Experimental Political Science, 7(2):112–136.
Huckfeldt, R. and Sprague, J. (1993). Citizens, contexts, and politics. In
Finifter, A. W., editor, Political science: The state of the discipline II,
pages 281–303. Washington, DC: American Political Science Association.
Huddy, L. (2013). From group identity to political cohesion and commit-
ment. In Huddy, L., Sears, D. O., and Levy, J. S., editors, The Oxford
handbook of political psychology. Oxford University Press.
Huddy, L. and Khatib, N. (2007). American patriotism, national iden-
tity, and political involvement. American Journal of Political Science,
51(1):63–77.
Ja¨ger, K. (2017). The potential of online sampling for studying political
activists around the world and across time. Political Analysis, 25(3):329–
343.
Jasinskaja-Lahti, I., Liebkind, K., and Solheim, E. (2009). To identify or
not to identify? National Disidentification as an Alternative Reaction to
Perceived Ethnic Discrimination. Applied Psychology: An International
Review, 58(1):105–128.
Jime´nez, T. R. (2011). Immigrants in the United States: How well are they
integrating into society. Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute.
Jones-Correa, M. (2001). Institutional and contextual factors in immigrant
naturalization and voting. Citizenship Studies, 5(1):41–56.
49
REFERENCES
Just, A. (2017). The far-right, immigrants, and the prospects of democracy
satisfaction in Europe. Party Politics, 23(5):507–525.
Just, A. and Anderson, C. J. (2014). Opinion climates and immigrant po-
litical action: A cross-national study of 25 European democracies. Com-
parative Political Studies, 47(7):935–965.
Kaufmann, E. (2014). ‘It’s the Demography, Stupid’: Ethnic Change and
Opposition to Immigration. The Political Quarterly, 85(3):267–276.
Kaufmann, E. and Harris, G. (2015). “White flight” or positive contact?
Local diversity and attitudes to immigration in Britain. Comparative
Political Studies, 48(12):1563–1590.
Key, V. O. (1949). Southern Politics in State and Nation. Alfred A. Knopf.
Koopmans, R. (2004). Migrant mobilisation and political opportunities:
variation among German cities and a comparison with the United King-
dom and the Netherlands. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies,
30(3):449–470.
Krosnick, J. A. and Alwin, D. F. (1989). Aging and susceptibility to attitude
change. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(3):416.
Kuo, A., Malhotra, N., and Mo, C. H. (2017). Social exclusion and polit-
ical identity: The case of Asian American partisanship. The Journal of
Politics, 79(1):17–32.
Lajevardi, N. and Oskooii, K. A. (2018). Old-fashioned racism, contempo-
rary islamophobia, and the isolation of Muslim Americans in the age of
Trump. Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, 3(1):112–152.
Lajevardi, N., Oskooii, K. A., Walker, H. L., and Westfall, A. L. (2020). The
paradox between integration and perceived discrimination among Ameri-
can Muslims. Political Psychology, 41(3):587–606.
Leszczensky, L., Maxwell, R., and Bleich, E. (2019). What factors best
explain national identification among Muslim adolescents? Evidence
from four European countries. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Stud-
ies, 46(1):260–276.
50
REFERENCES
Levi, M. and Stoker, L. (2000). Political trust and trustworthiness. Annual
Review of Political Science, 3(1):475–507.
Marble, W., Mousa, S., Siegel, A. A., et al. (2021). Can Exposure to Celebri-
ties Reduce Prejudice? The Effect of Mohamed Salah on Islamophobic
Behaviors and Attitudes. American Political Science Review, pages 1–18.
Marien, S. (2011). Measuring political trust across time and space. In
Zmerli, S. and Hooghe, M., editors, Political trust: Why context matters,
chapter 2, page 13. ECPR Press.
Marien, S. and Hooghe, M. (2011). Does political trust matter? An empirical
investigation into the relation between political trust and support for law
compliance. European Journal of Political Research, 50(2):267–291.
Maxwell, R. (2009). Caribbean and South Asian identification with British
society: The importance of perceived discrimination. Ethnic and Racial
Studies, 32(8):1449–1469.
Maxwell, R. (2010). Evaluating Migrant Integration: Political Attitudes
across Generations in Europe. International migration review, 44(1):25–
52.
Maxwell, R. (2013). The geographic context of political attitudes among
migrant-origin individuals in Europe. World Politics, 65(01):116–155.
Maxwell, R. and Bleich, E. (2014). What Makes Muslims Feel French?
Social Forces, 93(1):155–179.
Metz, E. C. and Youniss, J. (2005). Longitudinal gains in civic development
through school-based required service. Political Psychology, 26(3):413–
437.
Michelson, M. R. (2003). The corrosive effect of acculturation: How Mexican
Americans lose political trust. Social Science Quarterly, 84(4):918–933.
Miller, D. and Ali, S. (2014). Testing the national identity argument. Eu-
ropean Political Science Review, 6(2):237–259.
Minkenberg, M. (2001). The radical right in public office: Agenda-setting
and policy effects. West European Politics, 24(4):1–21.
51
REFERENCES
Moore, L. W. and Miller, M. (1999). Initiating research with doubly vul-
nerable populations. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 30(5):1034–1040.
Norris, P. (2005). Radical right: Voters and parties in the electoral market.
Cambridge University Press.
Norris, P. (2017). The conceptual framework of political support. In Zmerli,
S. and Van der Meer, T. W., editors, Handbook on political trust. Edward
Elgar Publishing.
Norris, P. and Puranen, B. (2019). Migrant hygge: Feeling at home in a
cold climate. Conference paper, under publication.
Okamoto, D. and Ebert, K. (2010). Beyond the ballot: Immigrant collective
action in gateways and new destinations in the United States. Social
Problems, 57(4):529–558.
Oskooii, K. A. (2016). How discrimination impacts sociopolitical behavior:
A multidimensional perspective. Political Psychology, 37(5):613–640.
Oskooii, K. A. (2020). Perceived discrimination and political behavior.
British Journal of Political Science, 50(3):867–892.
Pacheco, J. S. (2008). Political socialization in context: The effect of political
competition on youth voter turnout. Political Behavior, 30(4):415–436.
Pantoja, A. D., Ramirez, R., and Segura, G. M. (2001). Citizens by choice,
voters by necessity: Patterns in political mobilization by naturalized Lati-
nos. Political Research Quarterly, 54(4):729–750.
Pe´rez, E. O. (2015). Xenophobic rhetoric and its political effects on im-
migrants and their co-ethnics. American Journal of Political Science,
59(3):549–564.
Pew Research Center (2016). Immigrant share of population jumps in some
European countries. Available at https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
tank/2016/06/15/immigrant-share-of-population-jumps-in-some-
european-countries/.
Phillimore, J. (2012). Implementing integration in the UK: lessons for inte-
gration theory, policy and practice. Policy & Politics, 40(4):525–545.
52
REFERENCES
Piontkowski, U., Florack, A., Hoelker, P., and Obdrza´lek, P. (2000). Pre-
dicting acculturation attitudes of dominant and non-dominant groups.
International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 24(1):1–26.
Pirro, A. (2015). The Populist Radical Right in Central and Eastern Europe:
Ideology, Impact, and Electoral Performance. Routledge.
Platt, L. (2014). Is there assimilation in minority groups’ national, ethnic
and religious identity? Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37(1):46–70.
Ramakrishnan, S. K. and Espenshade, T. J. (2001). Immigrant incorpora-
tion and political participation in the United States. International Mi-
gration Review, 35(3):870–909.
Robinson, W. S. (2009). Ecological correlations and the behavior of indi-
viduals. International journal of epidemiology, 38(2):337–341.
Rydgren, J. (2003). Meso-level reasons for racism and xenophobia: Some
converging and diverging effects of radical right populism in France and
Sweden. European Journal of Social Theory, 6(1):45–68.
Rydgren, J. (2004). Mechanisms of exclusion: ethnic discrimination in
the Swedish labour market. Journal of Ethnic and Migration studies,
30(4):697–716.
Rydgren, J. (2008). Immigration sceptics, xenophobes or racists? Radical
right-wing voting in six West European countries. European Journal of
Political Research, 47(6):737–765.
Rydgren, J. and Tyrberg, M. (2020). Contextual explanations of radical
right-wing party support in Sweden: a multilevel analysis. European So-
cieties, pages 1–26.
Rydgren, J. and van der Meiden, S. (2019). The radical right and the end
of Swedish exceptionalism. European Political Science, 18(3):439–455.
Schaafsma, J. (2013). Through the lens of justice: Just world beliefs mediate
relationships between perceived discrimination and subjective well-being.
International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 37(4):450–458.
53
REFERENCES
Schlueter, E. and Scheepers, P. (2010). The relationship between outgroup
size and anti-outgroup attitudes: A theoretical synthesis and empirical
test of group threat-and intergroup contact theory. Social Science Re-
search, 39(2):285–295.
Schneider, S. L. (2008). Anti-immigrant attitudes in Europe: Outgroup size
and perceived ethnic threat. European Sociological Review, 24(1):53–67.
Selb, P. and Munzert, S. (2013). Voter overrepresentation, vote misreport-
ing, and turnout bias in postelection surveys. Electoral Studies, 32(1):186–
196.
Shariff-Marco, S., Breen, N., Landrine, H., Reeve, B. B., Krieger, N., Gee,
G. C., Williams, D. R., Mays, V. M., Ponce, N. A., Alegr´ıa, M., et al.
(2011). Measuring everyday racial/ethnic discrimination in health sur-
veys: How best to ask the questions, in one or two stages, across multiple
racial/ethnic groups? Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race,
8(1):159–177.
Simonsen, K. B. (2018). What it means to (not) belong: A case study of how
boundary perceptions affect second-generation immigrants’ attachments
to the nation. In Sociological Forum, volume 33, pages 118–138. Wiley
Online Library.
Simonsen, K. B. (2021a). The democratic consequences of anti-immigrant
political rhetoric: A mixed methods study of immigrants’ political be-
longing. Political Behavior, 43(1):143–174.
Simonsen, K. B. (2021b). Politics feeds back: The minority/majority
turnout gap and citizenship in anti-immigrant times. Perspectives on
Politics, 19(2):406–421.
Sniderman, P. M., Hagendoorn, L., and Prior, M. (2004). Predisposing
factors and situational triggers: Exclusionary reactions to immigrant mi-
norities. American political science review, 98(1):35–49.
Song, S. (2009). Democracy and noncitizen voting rights. Citizenship stud-
ies, 13(6):607–620.
54
REFERENCES
Stroebe, K., Dovidio, J. F., Barreto, M., Ellemers, N., and John, M.-S.
(2011). Is the world a just place? Countering the negative consequences
of pervasive discrimination by affirming the world as just. British Journal
of Social Psychology, 50(3):484–500.
Tajfel, H. and Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup
conflict. The social psychology of intergroup relations, 33(47):74.
Tingsten, H. (1937). Political behavior: Studies in election statistics. Num-
ber 7. PS King.
Turner, J. C., Hogg, M. A., Oakes, P. J., Reicher, S. D., and Wetherell,
M. S. (1987). Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory.
Basil Blackwell.
Tyrberg, M. (2019). Immigrants’ electoral participation – The cross-national
impact of public and political hostility. Journal of Ethnic and Migration
Studies, 46(15):3210–3234.
Tyrberg, M. (2021). Support for the political community in a community
that doesn’t support you: Immigrant youths’ exposure to anti-immigrant
attitudes. Journal of Youth Studies, 24(4):598–613.
Van Liempt, I. and Bilger, V. (2012). 21 Ethical challenges in research with
vulnerable migrants. In Vargas-Silva, C., editor, Handbook of research
methods in migration, page 451. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Verba, S., Schlozman, K. L., and Brady, H. E. (1995). Voice and equality:
Civic voluntarism in American politics. Harvard University Press.
Verkuyten, M. (2016). The integration paradox: Empiric evidence from the
Netherlands. American Behavioral Scientist, 60(5-6):583–596.
Vernby, K. (2013). Inclusion and public policy: Evidence from Sweden’s
introduction of noncitizen suffrage. American Journal of Political Science,
57(1):15–29.
Wass, H., Blais, A., Morin-Chasse´, A., and Weide, M. (2015). Engaging
immigrants? Examining the correlates of electoral participation among
voters with migration backgrounds. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion
and Parties, 25(4):407–424.
55
REFERENCES
Zaslove, A. (2004). Closing the door? The ideology and impact of radical
right populism on immigration policy in Austria and Italy. Journal of
Political Ideologies, 9(1):99–118.
56
Included papers I-III
1. Tyrberg, M. (2019). Immigrants’ electoral participation - The cross-
national impact of public and political hostility. Journal of Ethnic and
Migration Studies, 46(15), 3210—3234.
2. Tyrberg, M. (2021). Support for the political community in a commu-
nity that doesn’t support you: Immigrant youths’ exposure to anti-
immigrant attitudes. Journal of Youth Studies, 24(5):598–613.
3. Tyrberg, M. (2022). Integration, discrimination, and pro-immigrant
support — Surprising insights from a survey experiment in Germany
and Sweden. Unpublished Manuscript.
57