Immigration is an extremely divisive political issue in Western Europe and North America. We examine whether immigration policy preferences are more nuanced than commonly understood. Too often, analyses of immigration policy preferences only consider the number of people allowed into the country. Yet, immigration policy must also address which people are allowed into the country and what rights they can have. We present results from a series of original surveys conducted in Germany between April 2020 and August 2022. We find preferences about policies governing immigration flows are conditional on policies governing entrance criteria and rights eligibility. Respondents who oppose immigration in general are willing to compromise and allow more immigration if entrance criteria become more selective. Respondents who support immigration are willing to compromise and accept less immigration if rights become more generous. Our findings have implications for understanding divides over immigration as well as policy debates more generally.

In recent years, anti-refugee hate crimes have soared across Europe. We know this violence has spread fear among refugees, but we know less about its effects on the non-refugee population. This is an oversight, as research suggests political violence often has effects on the broader population. Those effects can range from increased solidarity with the targets of the violence to reduced pro-social behavior and less support for the targets of the violence. In this research note, we examine the effects of exposure to anti-refugee hate crimes in Germany. Our results suggest no direct effect of exposure to anti-refugee hate crimes on support for refugees. These results have several implications for our understanding of political divides over refugees in Europe.

Immigration policy is often considered one of the most divisive issues in Western Europe and North America. We explore whether that debate has been oversimplified. We start from the position that immigration is a complex issue comprising many specific policy choices. We then investigate whether preferences are consistently open or closed across a range of immigration policy criteria. We analyze an original survey with a nationally representative sample of Germans. Our results suggest that preferences are not consistently open or closed on immigration, integration, and naturalization regulations. Overall, the German public would prefer to be open on some aspects of immigration policy and closed on others. In addition, population subsets who are either "pro-" or "anti-" immigration in general have the same preferences for whether to be open or closed on specific immigration policies. Our findings promote a more detailed approach to studying immigration preferences, which adds nuance to the idea of immigration as a grand societal conflict. In doing so, we highlight how future studies can refine expectations about when policy preferences are more permissive or restrictive.

Recent scholarship on affective polarization documents partisan animosity that extends to people's everyday lives. But does partisan dislike go so far as to deny fundamental rights to political opponents? We study this question through a moral dilemma that gained worldwide notoriety during the COVID-19 pandemic: triage decisions on the allocation of intensive medical care. Using a conjoint experiment in Brazil, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United States, we study the influence of patients' partisanship in addition to commonly discussed factors determining access to intensive medical care. We find that while participants' choices are consistent with a utilitarian heuristic, revealed partisanship is a robust decision criterion across most countries. Supporters of left or right political camps are more likely to withhold support from partisan opponents, with right-party supporters being more strongly penalized. Our findings offer new comparative evidence on affective polarization in non-political contexts.

European countries are struggling with the largest inflows of asylum seekers since World War II, with ongoing debates about how best to promote asylum seeker integration. This article presents evidence from Germany which suggests asylum seekers feel more welcome when living in counties with more foreign-born residents. This relationship is stronger when asylum seekers and foreign-born residents have similar origins. Among Syrian asylum seekers, larger percentages of co-national residents are especially important. These findings have numerous implications that broaden our understanding of asylum seeker integration and engage debates about how to design asylum seeker reception policies. This article also contributes to broader debates about the relationship between geographic context and social and political attitudes.

: We report a large-scale randomized controlled trial assessing whether counter-stereotypical messaging and partisan cues can induce people to get COVID-19 vaccines. We created a 27-second video compilation of Donald Trump’s comments about the vaccine from Fox News interviews and presented the video to millions of U.S. YouTube users through a $100,000 advertising campaign in October 2021. Results indicate that the number of vaccines increased in the average treated county by 103 (with a one-tailed p -value of 0.097). Based on this average treatment effect and totaling across our 1,014 treated counties, the total estimated effect was 104,036 vaccines. Teaser: We report a field experiment showing how to overcome COVID vaccine hesitancy using political messengers.

This paper reports results from a large-scale randomized controlled trial assessing whether counter-stereotypical messaging and partisan cues can induce people to get COVID-19 vaccines. The study used a 27-s video compilation of Donald Trump's comments about the vaccine from Fox News interviews and presented the video to millions of U.S. YouTube users through a $100,000 advertising campaign in October 2021. Results indicate that the number of vaccines increased in the average treated county by 103 (with a one-tailed P value of 0.097). Based on this average treatment effect and totaling across our 1014 treated counties, the total estimated effect was 104,036 vaccines.

One of the biggest political questions across North America and Western Europe is how societies will adjust to increasing levels of ethnic, racial, and religious diversity. For many years, scholars have focused on the people who oppose diversity because their views are considered objectionable and in need of explanation. Ivarsflaten and Sniderman join a growing group of scholars who take a different approach and analyze the rest of the population: people inclined to support diversity. This is a crucial population segment because under the right conditions, they are the ones who will promote more tolerant and inclusive societies in the twenty-first century. Ivarsflaten and Sniderman use an impressive range of original surveys—with an approach they call “sequential factorials”—to analyze the conditions under which Europeans are more likely to support the inclusion of Muslim minorities. “The sequential factorial” approach conducts many small experiments that replicate previous findings (increasing confidence in the results) and then extend the insights into new directions. Throughout the book, Ivarsflaten and Sniderman use 34 different experiments on over 21,000 survey respondents from Norway, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, the United States, Germany, France, and Sweden.

As the number of people of color (PoC) grows in the United States, a key question is how partisanship will develop among this important electoral group. Yet many open questions remain about PoC partisanship, due to limited availability of panel data, a lack of sensitive instrumentation, and small samples of PoC in most public opinion surveys. This brief report leverages a unique panel of African American (N = 650) and Latino (N = 650) eligible voters, before and after the 2020 Presidential Election between Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump. Using measures that tap expressive partisan, racial, and national identity attachments, we find that Biden's electoral victory significantly intensified partisan identity among his Democratic PoC supporters, relative to PoC who were not Democrats and supported Trump. We do not find significant changes in racial or national identities. Our results advance research on PoC's partisanship.

We report a large-scale randomized controlled trial designed to assess whether the partisan cue of a provaccine message from Donald Trump would induce Americans to get COVID-19 vaccines. Our study involved presenting a 27-second advertisement to millions of U.S. YouTube users in October 2021. Results indicate that the campaign increased the number of vaccines in the average treated county by 103. Spread across 1,014 treated counties, the total effect of the campaign was an estimated increase of 104,036 vaccines. The campaign was cost-effective: with an overall budget of about $100,000, the cost to obtain an additional vaccine was about $1 or less.

Immigrant non-citizens are often considered less deserving than citizens of welfare and other public services. The logic is that valuable and scarce public resources must be limited somehow, and the club of citizens is one way of drawing a boundary. In this paper, we examine how far that boundary extends, by analyzing the extent to which Germans prioritize citizens over non-citizens for access to life-saving healthcare. We implement a conjoint experiment to elicit preferences in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The data were collected between April 2020 and March 2021, in 23 waves of an online rolling cross-sectional survey with roughly 17,000 respondents. Our main finding is that citizens are viewed as more deserving of healthcare than non-citizen immigrants, a relationship that is sizeable and robust. Our findings have implications for debates about social boundaries and how to allocate resources in Western Europe.

This short report describes the development of a COVID-19 module for Round 10 of the European Social Survey (ESS). The module is formed of 20 items, including 10 agreed with ESS National Coordinators and 10 developed by two academic teams following an external call for content. The majority of ESS participating countries will field the module for Round 10 fieldwork in 2020–2021. This report provides the rationale for the module, presents challenges of developing such a module for ESS, and gives an overview of the question development and testing process. The two external sub-modules— Government authority and legitimacy in the age of a pandemic and COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs and government rule compliance —are also introduced.

In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. In this Perspectives Reflection, we crystallize the central findings of a three-year deliberative process—the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD)—involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. Following an overview of the process and the key insights that emerged, we present summaries of the QTD Working Groups’ final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net , the reports unpack transparency’s promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports—the full versions of which can be found in the Supplementary Materials—offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate—as understood by relevant research communities—to the forms of inquiry being assessed. We dedicate this Reflection to the memory of our coauthor and QTD working group leader Kendra Koivu. 1

ABSTRACTWearing face masks to combat the spread of COVID-19 became a politicized and contested practice in the United States, largely due to misinformation and partisan cues from masking opponents. This article examines whether Public Service Announcements (PSAs) can encourage the use of face masks. We designed two PSAs: one describes the benefits of using face masks; the other uses a novel messenger (i.e., a retired US general) to advocate for them. We conducted two studies. First, we aired our PSAs on television and surveyed residents of the media market to determine if they saw the PSA and how they felt about wearing face masks. Second, we conducted a randomized experiment on a diverse national sample. Both studies suggest that exposure to our PSAs increased support for face masks and induced greater compliance with public health advice. These findings have implications for how governments might fight pandemics.

Large cities are cosmopolitan environments where people embrace inter-national connections whereas small towns, villages, and the countryside are more likely to prioritize the maintenance of national traditions. These geographic divides are at the center of contemporary politics but we do not know why they exist. One possibility is that cities make people more cosmopolitan while smaller areas make people less cosmopolitan. However, credibly measuring geographic effects is difficult because people sort across geography in ways that are correlated with political attitudes. I address these methodological challenges with longitudinal data from the Swiss Household Panel. My central result is that evidence of contextual effects is limited and unlikely to account for the broad geographic divides. Instead, sorting is likely to be the most important explanation for spatial polarization over cosmopolitanism. These findings have several implications for our understanding of geographic divides.

In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. This essay is the introduction to a symposium that crystallizes the central findings of a three-year deliberative process – the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD) – involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. The symposium’s centerpiece is a series of summaries of the QTD Working Group’s final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net, the reports unpack transparency’s promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate – as understood by relevant research communities – to the forms of inquiry being assessed.

This is the summary of Qualitative Transparency Deliberations Final Report on Research on Vulnerable and Marginalized Populations, Working Group number IV.3.

Europe is geographically divided on the issue of immigration. Large cities are the home of Cosmopolitan Europe, where immigration is viewed positively. Outside the large cities—and especially in the countryside—is Nationalist Europe, where immigration is a threat. This divide is well documented and much discussed, but there has been scant research on why people in large cities are more likely to have favorable opinions about immigration. Debates about geographic differences generally highlight two explanations: contextual or compositional effects. I evaluate the two with data from the European Social Survey, the Swiss Household Panel, and the German Socio-Economic Panel. Results support compositional effects and highlight the importance of (demographic and cultural) mechanisms that sort pro-immigration people into large cities. This has several implications for our understanding of societal divisions in Europe; most notably that geographic polarization is a second-order manifestation of deeper (demographic and cultural) divides.

Globalization poses many challenges for national cultural unity, especially in Europe. Some doubt whether national cultures will be able to survive, but there are many counter-trends pushing to maintain national cultural unity. I analyse the dual trends of global diversity and maintaining unity through an everyday manifestation of French culture: elementary school lunches. French school lunch programmes are part of the nation-building process because they are designed to teach students how to eat, which is especially important in France where the art of gastronomy is a key source of identity and pride. I analyse cultural influences on over 11,000 school lunch menu items from eight municipalities across two French regions. I also conduct in-depth face-to-face interviews with the people who design and approve school lunch menus. My inquiry is guided by three key questions. First, to what extent are foreign influences included? Second, does openness to foreign influences vary across different parts of France? Finally, how are foreign cultures represented? My results suggest that foreign cultures are deployed to nationalize difference. The limited foreign influences that appear in school lunches are strategically chosen to appeal to and to educate students, but in a way that reinforces the centrality of traditional French cultural norms. This article contributes to our understanding of the tension between national culture and a globalizing world.

ABSTRACT An important public debate in contemporary Europe is whether immigrant-origin Muslims will successfully integrate into mainstream society. We engage those debates by analysing national identification among immigrant-origin Muslim adolescents in England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. A common argument is that the Islamic religion prevents Muslims from integrating because its practices are incompatible with mainstream European culture. However, we find that religiosity is not the most important predictor of Muslim identification. Instead, citizenship, contact with the native majority, and perceived discrimination are all as important as religiosity for predicting Muslim national identification. In addition, we find the same relationships between these variables and national identification among Muslim and non-Muslim immigrant-origin adolescents. Country of birth, host language proficiency, and socio-economic status, by contrast, are less important predictors of national identification of both groups. In sum, our findings suggest that Muslims are not necessarily a uniquely problematic population, as their national identification is best understood through dynamics that affect immigrants more broadly rather than Muslims specifically, though more research is necessary to identify specific causal pathways.