🔎 What This Paper Argues
This study proposes a new typology separating polity-specific attitudes (shaped by national contexts) from transnational attitudes (shaped by migratory experience). The typology is applied to four core dimensions of political competition in contemporary Europe: redistribution, homosexuality, European integration, and immigration.
📊 How Attitudes Were Measured and Compared
- Uses cross-sectional and panel survey data totaling nearly 380,000 observations from 104 sending countries and 28 destination countries.
- Introduces a new modeling strategy for cross-classified hierarchical data to better capture migrants' ties to both origin and destination contexts.
- Explicitly addresses common problems in group comparison and advances two empirical probes into migrants' self-selection.
📈 What the Evidence Shows
- Migration produces two distinct processes:
- Acculturation of polity-specific attitudes: migrants tend to adopt host-country positions on redistribution and attitudes toward homosexuality.
- Cosmopolitanization of transnational attitudes: migrants develop a uniquely liberal outlook on European integration and immigration.
- These results are consistent across both cross-sectional and panel analyses and after accounting for selection into migration.
💡 Why This Matters
- Demonstrates that political attitude change among migrants is multidimensional: some views align with host societies while others become more transnational and liberal.
- Implicates major revisions to how attitudinal change and the dimensionality of ideological space are theorized, measured, and compared across groups.
