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

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