Outsiders not Worth Trusting? Accounting for Concerns over Immigration in Central and Eastern Europe

The truth is that they [migrants] don’t respect our culture, they don’t respect our laws, and they don’t respect our way of life; instead they make room for their own way of life, then suppress ours, and finally supplant ours with theirs. The issue of migrants is therefore an issue of identity as well as sovereignty (Viktor Orbán, 27 June 2017).

Introduction

When migration seems to be on everybody’s lips in most of Europe, it is easy to forget that immigration – both as an actual reality and ‘a looming prospect’ – is experienced differently in the various national contexts. This was particularly evident in the heat of the 2015 refugee crisis which ended up pitting a largely (although not uniformly) solidarity-oriented Old Europe versus strongly anti-immigration countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).¹ Paradoxically, the crisis served to strengthen anti-immigration dispositions in CEE more than it did in the West, despite the fact that CEE countries did not see a substantial rise in their refugee populations (Bell, Valenta and Strabac 2021; Lancaster 2022; Peshkopia, Bllaca and Lika 2022; van der Brug and Harteveld 2021). While it is very tempting to look for universal Europe-wide explanations of immigration attitudes, such attempts are likely to tell only part of the story, as identical variables may acquire different meanings depending on the national context (Chang 2019; Esses, Wagner, Wolf, Preiser and Wilbur 2006).

While public opinion on immigration attracted considerable scholarly interest (Hainmueller and Hopkins 2014), only a fraction of existing research on the determinants of immigration attitudes focuses on the CEE region. Nevertheless, CEE presents an interesting case of high opposition to immigration in the absence of large immigration flows. This is in contrast with Western and Northern European countries which hosted substantial immigrant populations in previous decades. One of the sources of this paradox may be that, since the beginning of the post-communist period, CEE countries share ‘a desire to build an ethnically and culturally homogeneous society with a distinct national identity based on an ethno-cultural core nation’ (Gorodzeisky 2023: 656). If immigration numbers in Old Europe are high enough for immigration attitudes to be shaped by real (although subjective) experiences – either personal interactions with immigrants or perceived impacts of immigration on the country – immigration in CEE remains, by and large, a potential or future issue. In such a context, immigration views are expected to be shaped by collective identity attributes as well as core value orientations.

While, in many CEE countries, immigration is often construed as a future eventuality, it has become increasingly important in recent years. Even before hosting unprecedented numbers of refugees fleeing war in Ukraine in 2022, some CEE countries saw the figures of economically driven immigration rise (Duszczyk and Matuszczyk 2018). Moreover, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland have been facing a challenge of coercive engineered migration (Greenhill 2010) from Belarus since 2021. All this shows that the issue of immigration is becoming more and more relevant in the CEE region and is likely to become even more important due to the demographic challenges which these countries will be facing in future years. It is therefore very important to know which factors are driving immigration attitudes in the region, not least because these views are likely to play an increasingly important role in shaping people’s political choices. Moreover, insights into the determinants of immigration attitudes could feed into immigrant admission and integration policy approaches, helping CEE countries to accommodate migration in a harmonious way.

This article aims to answer the following research question: why are some CEE residents more concerned with immigration than others? Seeking to shed more light on the key drivers of immigration concerns in the CEE region, the study encompasses 10 countries that joined the European Union (EU) in the last two decades – Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.² It employs the 2017 European Values Study (EVS) data to run fixed-effects linear and logistic regression models, focusing on outcome measures capturing economic and cultural concerns over immigration. The study tests a range of hypotheses on the relationship between CEE residents’ collective identities and value orientations on the one hand and immigration concerns on the other. Given that EVS 2017 fieldwork took place in 2017 and 2018, the article offers an explanation of CEE residents’ immigration views against the backdrop of the 2015 refugee crisis. By focusing on the correlates of immigration concerns in CEE and offering a region-specific interpretation of the findings, the paper offers an attempt to bring more understanding into the complex relationship of the CEE region with immigration. While the statistical approach adopted here means that the comparative analysis of immigration concerns in CEE and Old Europe is not pursued, the findings of this research may provide an impetus for this kind of study by engendering hypotheses on how the correlates of immigration concerns may differ in two parts of the continent as well as the contextual factors that may explain these differences.

The findings of the study suggest that key individual predictors of immigration concerns in CEE are the level of social trust and the content of national identity. A low level of trust in people of another nationality is associated with high concerns over immigration. Similarly, opposition to immigration in CEE was also found to be related to low levels of general interpersonal trust. Meanwhile, those CEE residents who defined national membership using both ascriptive (ancestry, being born in a country) and voluntarist (respecting a country’s political institutions and laws, speaking a country’s main language) criteria were more likely to be concerned about immigration than people defining their national identity in solely voluntarist terms. Social trust and the content of national identity were shown to be important for shaping both economic and cultural concerns over immigration. The study also found that the relationship between strong national pride and high concerns over immigration was strong only in the Visegrád Four – countries in which the issue of immigration had been made the object of political mobilisation to a higher degree than in most other countries in the region. Additionally, the study found that stronger attachment to Europe and less-frequent church attendance were correlated with an optimistic view of immigration’s economic impacts. Finally, the study did not find evidence that strong national attachment fostered anti-immigrant sentiments in CEE.

Low social trust and a high prevalence of ethnicised understandings of nationhood are important characteristics of CEE societies, both of them deeply rooted in historical processes and experiences – primarily those related to state and nation formation as well as the communist period. The article therefore shows that immigration attitudes are deeply embedded in societal value systems that are, in turn, shaped by distinctive historical legacies. In so doing, it reflects on what these value systems and legacies imply for the development of immigration attitudes in the future. I maintain that, for immigration attitudes to change in CEE, historical imprints on prevailing value systems need to be acknowledged and counterbalanced by alternative – and potentially more inclusive – narratives around national identity as well as a person’s relationship with others. The paper also suggests that building a healthy state with strong national attachments is not incompatible with a pro-immigrant ethos. Finally, the study emphasises the role of the high political salience of immigration in activating the negative effect of patriotism on immigration attitudes.

Literature review and hypotheses

Multiple quantitative studies have shown that so-called ‘sociotropic’ explanations of immigration attitudes – focusing on the perceived economic and cultural impact of immigration on the whole country – carry more weight than those focusing on an individual’s self-interest. Moreover, the finding that anti-immigrant attitudes are primarily driven by concerns over the cultural impact of immigration as well as its supposed threat to national distinctiveness has repeatedly emerged (Hainmueller and Hopkins 2014: 225). However, these findings were mainly informed by studies focusing on immigration attitudes in North America and Western Europe. Meanwhile, two recent studies on immigration attitudes in CEE suggest that economic concerns may be as important as cultural fears in shaping people’s immigration attitudes in the region (Duman 2022; Thérová 2023). Duman (2022) found that economic fears were ‘vastly crucial in shaping the public attitudes against migrants and refugees across CEE countries’ (2022: 112) and that all countries in the region saw large increases in welfare nationalism after the refugee crisis.

As outlined above, economic or cultural concerns over immigration are often conceptualised as potential predictors or mediators of immigration attitudes (Heath, Davidov, Ford, Green, Ramos and Schmidt 2020). However, this study seeks to contribute to a growing body of literature that treats concerns over immigration or perceptions of immigrant threat as an outcome variable (Bandelj and Gibson 2020; Meuleman, Abts, Schmidt, Pettigrew and Davidov 2020). Importantly, the determinants affecting concerns over immigration may differ depending on how these concerns are framed. In a study focusing on 16 Eastern European countries, Bandelj and Gibson (2020) found that a respondent’s economic status was statistically significantly linked to concerns over immigration only when immigration was framed as an economic (as opposed to cultural) problem. Both cultural and economic concerns about immigration may be closely linked to social identities (Tajfel and Turner 1979) as well as basic value orientations (Duman 2022: 112–113). This article seeks to identify which identities and values matter the most and under what conditions.

A significant number of studies analysed how immigration attitudes were informed by various aspects of national identity, including patriotism or national pride, nationalism, the intensity of national self-identification and the content of national identity. A traditional distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism³ was commonly invoked with respect to the latter aspect, with ethnic construal of national identity repeatedly emerging as an important determinant of anti-immigrant attitudes (Byrne 2011; Lindstam, Mader and Schoen 2021; Wright 2011). Nevertheless, it has also been shown that neither civic nor ethnic national identity were relevant for explaining immigration attitudes in Asian countries (Jeong 2016). Therefore, the overwhelming evidence confirming the relevance of ethnic/civic distinction might well be related to the presence of geographical bias in immigration research.

Some studies have looked into the interaction effect between ethnic and civic national identities. According to Byrne and Dixon (2013), civic nationalism can also lead to hostility towards immigrants. In particular, higher support for the civic understanding of nationhood is associated with stronger anti-immigrant attitudes for people who have little affinity for ethnic concepts of national identity (Byrne and Dixon 2013: 106). Moreover, a number of authors have suggested that the ethnic and civic dimensions of nationalism should not be viewed as mutually exclusive, as people can adopt both conceptions of nationhood simultaneously (Hjerm 1998; Janmaat 2006; Reeskens and Hooghe 2010). It was also suggested that, in European countries, the key distinction was between those who perceived their nation as a merely cultural and civic entity (a ‘thin’ conception of nationhood held by voluntarist nationalists) and those who believed that ascriptive national membership criteria – ancestry and birthplace – were also important (a ‘thick’ conception of national identity espoused by multiple nationalists⁴) (Bartasevičius 2023). However, it was shown that the latter conception brings a certain degree of ambivalence to people’s stances on immigration (Lindstam, Mader and Schoen 2021). There is therefore a need to check the extent to which a ‘thick’ conception of nationhood is associated with anti-immigrant views. CEE countries provide a good context for testing this relationship as they have more multiple nationalists on average than Western or Northern European countries (Bartasevičius 2023).

H1: In CEE, espousing both ascriptive and voluntarist nationhood criteria simultaneously is associated with negative views towards immigration.

The intensity of national identification can be understood as the extent to which a person feels attached to their country. Having reviewed existing survey evidence on the relationship between national identification and anti-immigrant sentiment, Pehrson and Green (2010: 699) suggested that there was no clear positive relationship between the two. Meanwhile, the findings of their own study showed that ‘national identification was significantly associated with negative feelings toward asylum-seekers only among individuals who endorse an ethnic definition of the English national group’ (Pehrson and Green 2010: 700). Nevertheless, a cross-national EU-wide study by Curtis (2014) concluded that greater national identification was matched by less-inclusive views towards immigrants. While there is, therefore, some ambiguity regarding the relationship between national identification and immigration views, nationalism (expressed as the perceived superiority of one’s nation vis-à-vis the others) was consistently found to predict more-negative attitudes towards immigrants and immigration (Esses, Sutter, Bouchard, Choi and Denice 2021; Jeong 2013). Finally, like national identification, patriotism was found to have uneven effects on immigration attitudes in different studies, with strong national pride at times predicting more negative attitudes, more positive attitudes or having no effect (Esses et al. 2021). While Jeong (2013) concluded that national pride led to pro-immigrant sentiment in the US, a study looking at a broader set of countries found that pride in one’s country was associated with anti-immigrant views in every country included in the analysis except Portugal, Canada and New Zealand (Citrin 2013).

H2: In CEE, strong national identification is associated with negative views towards immigration.

H3: In CEE, strong national pride is associated with negative views towards immigration.

In addition to testing the hypotheses, the study will assess whether or not the relevance of key national identity variables depends on country-level characteristics. Based on previous literature, it is reasonable to expect that the role that patriotism plays in shaping immigration attitudes will be contingent on how prevalent alternative conceptions of nationhood are in a country (Esses et al. 2006). If strong national pride is expressed in a country characterised by the high popularity of a ‘thick’ conception of nationhood, patriotism can be expected to be associated with anti-immigrant sentiment. Another potentially important country-level characteristic is the level of a country’s ethnic homogeneity. In a recent study on public attitudes towards asylum-seekers in CEE, Gorodzeisky (2023) found support for the hypothesis that citizens from ethnically homogenous countries adopt less-exclusionary attitudes toward asylum-seekers than citizens from countries characterised by a lower and less-stable share of the ethnic majority. However, there is also evidence suggesting that anti-prejudice norms may be more characteristic of ethnically heterogeneous countries (Igarashi and Nagayoshi 2022). Citizens of an ethnically homogeneous country may be more likely to report anti-immigrant attitudes because – in this ethnodemographic context – it may actually be normative to hold such views (Igarashi and Nagayoshi 2022: 1). If this is indeed the case, one would expect people expressing strong national identification and pride with their ethnically homogeneous country or those espousing a ‘thick’ conception of nationhood to hold more-negative views of immigrants than those who do not have strong emotional attachment to their country or who reject ascriptive nationhood criteria. Also, no such relationship should be found in ethnically heterogeneous countries. Finally, the relationship between national identity variables and concerns over immigration in Visegrád countries may differ from that observed in other CEE countries. This is because the political mobilisation over the immigration issue in response to the 2015 refugee crisis was strongest in the Visegrád Four.

Another individual-level factor that could play a role in explaining anti-immigrant attitudes in CEE is the strength of European identity. Interestingly, the kind of effect which (positive or negative) attachment to Europe may have depends largely on how this supranational identity is perceived. There are at least two broad forms of European identity. The first emphasises the crucial role of Christian legacy and treats Europe as primarily a cultural community. This way of defining European identity – sometimes called ‘European nationalism’ – is built on the idea of a ‘primordial European identity’ (Risse 2015, cited in Lancaster 2022: 551) rooted in common cultural history and is therefore expected to correlate with negative attitudes toward non-European immigrants. However, strong European identity can also be seen as an expression of approval for civic principles defended by the EU, including democracy, tolerance, non-discrimination and human rights. In congruence with this view, Curtis (2014) found that those who feel European hold more favourable views toward immigrants. If European identity is related to pro-immigrant views, cosmopolitan identity (feeling attached to the world) can be expected to have a similar effect (Esses, Dovidio, Semenya and Jackson 2005).

H4: In CEE, having a strong European identity is associated with positive views towards immigration.

H5: In CEE, having a strong cosmopolitan identity is associated with positive views towards immigration.

Like attachment to Europe, religious identity is a multilayered concept which can relate to immigration attitudes in different ways. Analysing the relationship between religious identity and attitudes towards immigration in Western Europe, Storm (2011: 219) found that Christian identification was often perceived ‘as a cultural identity label with little religious content, and frequently conflated with national, ethnic, local or family identities’. The author’s analysis suggested that Christian affiliation (regarding oneself as belonging to the Christian religion) was associated with anti-immigrant attitudes (2011: 206). In a study focusing on immigration attitudes in Poland, Thérová (2023) found that religiosity had become one of the strongest predictors of anti-immigrant attitudes after the 2015 refugee crisis (2023: 398). However, the same study by Storm (2011) concluded that ‘regular church attendance’ was ‘associated with positive attitudes to immigration’ (2011: 206). Since regular churchgoers may have ‘greater concern with and exposure to civic moral values, actively religious people express more tolerant attitudes to other people in general’ (Storm 2011: 206), including immigrants. Recent analysis by Gu, Zhang and Zhiwen (2022) confirmed that membership in religious organisations and church attendance decreased hostility towards immigrants.

H6: In CEE, regarding oneself as belonging to the Christian religion is associated with negative attitudes towards immigration.

H7: In CEE, frequent church attendance is associated with positive attitudes towards immigration.

Along with various types of collective identity variables, social-psychological factors and basic human values can also be expected to affect people’s immigration attitudes. Two of these have been repeatedly invoked in previous studies on the determinants of immigration views – interpersonal (social) trust and Universalism. Focusing on Western and Northern European countries, Sides and Citrin (2007: 493) found that higher levels of social trust tended ‘to produce attitudes that are less anti-immigrant’. While there are more studies echoing these findings (e.g. Ekici and Yucel 2015; Herreros and Criado 2009; Mitchell 2021), Thérová’s analysis of the Polish data did not identify any significant link between social trust and opinions on immigration (2023: 398). This negative finding provides additional incentive to explore the relationship between interpersonal trust and immigration attitudes in a smaller set of CEE countries. Meanwhile, Universalism, operationalised as ‘understanding, appreciation, tolerance and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature’, has been shown to correlate with pro-immigrant attitudes in some CEE countries (Cichocki and Jabkowski 2019: 40; Thérová 2023: 398).

H8: In CEE, low interpersonal trust is associated with negative attitudes towards immigration.

H9: In CEE, support for Universalist values is associated with positive attitudes towards immigration.

Finally, previous research suggested that immigration attitudes could be related to perceived collective (state) vulnerability. Having conducted the analysis on immigration attitudes in Russia, Gorodzeisky (2019) demonstrated that perceived state/collective vulnerability in areas such as the economy, government functioning, the education system and health services ‘tends to notably increase anti-immigrant attitudes among ethnic Russians’ (2019: 208). In Gorodzeisky’s study, perceived vulnerability was assessed by measuring how satisfied people were with the current situation in each area indicated above. In CEE countries, it is likely that so-called ‘losers’ of the post-communist transformation (see e.g. Barowiec 2023) will perceive their state as being in a poor condition and vulnerable to a higher degree than those who supposedly benefited from democratisation and the market economy. It is therefore possible that diverging assessments of the country’s post-communist developments relate to immigration attitudes.

H10: In CEE, high perceived collective (state) vulnerability is associated with negative attitudes towards immigration.

Data and method

The analysis presented in this article was carried out using EVS 2017 data.⁵ The dataset contains all the variables required for testing the hypotheses identified above in the 10 CEE countries included in the present study. Most importantly, the dataset includes data on the content of national identity – an aspect of national identification not captured by many other European-wide surveys. Since previous studies pointed to the centrality of both economic and cultural concerns in shaping CEE residents’ immigration views, this study ran statistical models on two different outcome variables – one of them reflecting economic fears and the other measuring cultural concerns. The first outcome variable measured respondents’ agreement with the statement that Immigrants take jobs away from [NATIONALITY] on a scale from 1 (strong agreement) to 10 (strong disagreement), capturing realistic threats as posited by integration threat theory (Stephan and Stephan 1993). The second outcome variable measured whether respondents indicated immigrants/foreign workers among groups of people that they would not like to have as neighbours, relating to a fear of the cultural ‘other’. This survey item has been used for measuring cultural prejudice and xenophobia in multiple studies (see e.g. Arts and Halman 2006; Chacha and Kobayashi 2018; Strabac and Listhaug 2008). While the first outcome measure may be seen as referring to immigrants who are already in the country, it also captures people’s concerns over the economic consequences of future larger-scale immigration. This is particularly likely in countries with relatively low numbers of foreigners.

As core identities and values tend to form early in a person’s life and are considered to be rather stable, one can be reasonably confident that it is these identities and values that shape CEE residents’ views on a relatively new issue of immigration and not the other way around. This is essential, as many quantitative studies of immigration attitudes struggled with the issue of endogeneity and were unable to convincingly show that immigration attitudes were indeed the result and not the cause of explanatory variables (Hainmueller and Hopkins 2014: 243). Only those variables that measure core identities and values were therefore used when testing hypotheses of this study. All independent variables that were included in statistical models to test the hypotheses of this study are listed in the table below.

Table 1. Main independent variables used in the study

Notes: prepared by the author using EVS variable report, available at: https://europeanvaluesstudy.eu/methodology-data-documentation/evs-trend-file-1981-2017/data-and-documentation-evs-trend-file/

This study drew on existing research to determine the content of the national identity definitions of EVS 2017 respondents. Using latent class analysis, Bartasevičius (2023) identified two broad groupings of EVS 2017 respondents according to their understandings of nationhood: voluntarist and multiple nationalists. The first group of respondents was characterised by their dismissal of the ascriptive criteria of national membership (ancestry, being born in a country) in favour of voluntarist attributes of national identity. In contrast, multiple nationalists simultaneously approved of ascriptive and voluntarist national membership criteria. A binary variable representing the content of national identity was therefore used in regression models (1 – multiple nationalist; 0 – voluntarist nationalist).

A composite measure of perceived state vulnerability was used, derived by adding reported levels of confidence in the education system, the health care system and the government. High scores on this index indicated high perceived collective vulnerability. The vulnerability measure employed in this paper is, nevertheless, different from the original index used by Gorodzeisky (2019). First, while Gorodzeisky used level of dissatisfaction with each aspect of state functioning to construct a perceived state vulnerability index, the present study relied on confidence measures. Second, while, in Gorodzeisky’s study, responses to each dissatisfaction item ranged on an 11-point scale, a 4-point scale was used to assess respondents’ confidence levels in this analysis. Third, as EVS 2017 did not contain a suitable measure capturing CEE residents’ (dis)satisfaction with the state of the economy, this item was not part of the present study. These measurement aspects may have had an effect on the results. The EVS 2017 variable on religious affiliation was recoded to binary to test the effect of Christian belonging. Roman Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Other Christian (Evangelical/Pentecostal/Free Church/etc.) respondents were coded as 1; all others as 0.

Six socio-demographic covariates were included in statistical models: sex (1=male; 2=female), educational level, age, size of town, unemployment status and occupation type. Respondents’ educational level was measured using the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), varying from less than primary to doctoral or equivalent. Five town-size categories were used according to the number of residents: under 5,000, 5,000–20,000, 20,000–100,000, 100,000–500,000 and 500,000+. Dummy variables were used for unemployment status (1=unemployed; 0=all others) and occupation type (1=having an occupation belonging to major groups 6–9 of the International Standard Classification of Occupations – the so-called ‘blue-collar’ professions (Elias 1997); 0=all others). It was also presumed that the extent to which someone sees immigrants as economic competitors of the local population can be strongly influenced by their personal views towards competition, income equality and the centrality of economic growth. Therefore, the following survey items were used as covariates when modelling economic concerns: How would you place your views on this scale? Competition is good–Competition is harmful (10-point scale), Incomes should be made more equal–There should be greater incentives for individual effort (10-point scale). A dummy variable was also employed for assessing the perceived importance of economic growth and creating jobs in relation to environmental protection (1=believing that economic growth and creating jobs should be the top priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent; 0=all others).⁶

Finally, to test the interaction effect between national pride and the prevalence of nationhood conceptions, previous findings on the percentage of voluntarist nationalists in each CEE country were employed (Bartasevičius 2023: 946). Census data were used for measuring CEE countries’ ethnic homogeneity. A percentage of non-ethnics (people who do not belong to a ‘titular’ majority) among all those who declared their ethnicity was estimated for each country (the data are provided in Appendix A).

The analysis presented in this article is based on fixed-effects regression models. Using country fixed effects allows the researcher to control for country-level heterogeneity and test whether the effects of individual-level predictors are present in the whole CEE region (Möhring 2012). Linear regression models were run with the ‘Immigrants take jobs away from [NATIONALITY]’ variable and binary logistic regression was employed for the second outcome measure (‘not wanting to have immigrants/foreign workers as neighbours’). In addition to the effects of individual-level predictors, cross-level interaction effects were estimated to check whether the effects of national identity variables were moderated by country-level characteristics. Separate regression models with a single cross-level interaction term were run to check for each of the possible cross-level interaction effects outlined above. The study also tested for any interaction effects between those key individual-level predictors (see Table 1) which had been shown to have a statistically significant relationship with the outcome in the model with main effects only. A model containing all statistically significant interaction terms is reported.⁷ To account for the arbitrary correlation of the errors within clusters (countries), clustered standard errors were used (Davis and Deole 2015; Espinosa, Guerra, Sanatkar, Paolini, Damigella, Licciardello and Gaertner 2018; Lancaster 2022). Analysis was run using the Fixest package in R (Bergé 2018). As this study is concerned with the immigration attitudes of native residents, first-generation migrants were excluded from the analysis. Respondents with missing data on any of the included predictor or outcome variables were also excluded.⁸

Results

Main analysis

The main output of the regression models is presented in the tables below. Four models are reported for the first outcome measure (assessment of whether immigrants take jobs away from natives) and three for the second (indicating/not indicating that they would not like to have immigrants/foreign workers as neighbours). For both outcome measures, Model 1 includes only key predictors used for hypothesis testing (see Table 1). Model 2 additionally includes control variables and is therefore the main model, while Model 3 produces standardised regression coefficients. Model 4 reports statistically significant interaction effects as identified in this analysis. It is only reported for the first outcome as no statistically significant interaction terms were identified for the second one.

Table 2. Fixed-effects OLS regression models with the following outcome measure: assessment of whether immigrants take jobs away from natives

Notes: β coefficients are reported, with clustered standard errors in the parentheses. ***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05.

Table 3. Fixed-effects logistic regression models with the following outcome measure: would not like to have as neighbours – immigrants/foreign workers (mentioned/not mentioned)

Notes: β coefficients are reported, with clustered standard errors in the parentheses. ***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05.

Based on the regression models, only one of the three national identity variables had a statistically significant relationship with immigration attitudes in CEE. In accordance with theoretical expectations, espousing both voluntarist and ascriptive nationhood criteria was shown to be positively associated with economic (–0.612, p=0.000) and cultural (0.062, p=0.004) concerns about immigration, providing strong support for H1. The findings suggest that subjective definitions of who is to be included in or excluded from the national community play a more important role in shaping CEE residents’ immigration attitudes than the affective dimension of national identity. In fact, the present study provides no evidence that strong emotional attachment to one’s country (0.104, p=0.413; –0.005, p=0.526)⁹ or national pride (0.053, p=0.610; –0.003, p=0.735) engender anti-immigrant views. Therefore, H2 and H3 were not supported. Nor was the effect of national pride on immigration views moderated by the prevalence of the voluntarist conception of nationhood in a country. More generally, the findings suggest that there is nothing incompatible between a strong national consciousness and a pro-immigrant disposition in CEE. At least in principle, countries in the region could invest in both strengthening the cohesiveness of their national communities and ensuring a wider acceptance of immigrants.

However, the analysis of interaction effects revealed that national pride has a stronger positive association with economic concerns about immigration in ethnically homogenous (–0.021, p=0.049) and Visegrád countries (0.402, p=0.018). While these findings require further development, one could tentatively hypothesise that, in relatively ethnically homogeneous CEE countries, ‘uniform’ ethnic composition acts as one of the sources of national pride. Meanwhile, a significant interaction term between national pride and living in a Visegrád country may suggest that the relationship between national pride and immigration views becomes more relevant under the conditions of intense political mobilisation over immigration. To the extent that the political mobilisation around the immigration issue after the 2015 refugee crisis was strongest in Visegrád countries, the present study provides some support for Lancaster’s (2022) observation that the politicisation of migration leads to the increased relevance of pre-existing sociocultural attitudes for the formation of immigration attitudes (Lancaster 2022: 560).

In models focusing on economic and cultural concerns over immigration, feeling close to Europe was shown to be associated with positive views on immigration in CEE (–0.340, p=0.005 and 0.017, p=0.091 respectively). As the p value of the regression coefficient in the second model was slightly over the accepted threshold of 0.05, H4 is only partially confirmed. Meanwhile, H5 is not supported as cosmopolitan identity did not have a statistically significant relationship with immigration attitudes in CEE (0.021; p=0.824; 0.021, p=0.181). The finding that feeling close to the world is not associated with pro-immigration views in CEE is puzzling and leads one to look more closely into the mechanism linking European identity and immigration attitudes. If European identity consisted of nothing more than a set of abstract civic values defended by the EU (e.g. individual rights, tolerance, non-discrimination etc.), it is not clear why cosmopolitan identity – which can be viewed as a broader and fuller embodiment of the same inclusive values – does not seem to engender pro-immigration views. The relevance of European identity for immigration attitudes in CEE could, therefore, be explained by the specific stances taken by Germany and the EU on the management of the 2015 refugee crisis. For CEE residents, Europe – both by pursuing a humanitarian ‘open door’ policy towards refugees and pushing for burden-sharing arrangements within the EU – emerged as the key actor facilitating migration from third countries. In this context, it is not surprising that, in CEE, people who do not feel close to Europe tend to have negative views on immigration.

Both hypotheses on the role of religiosity in shaping immigration attitudes in CEE (H6 and H7) were rejected. According to the models, there is no statistically significant relationship between identifying oneself as a Christian and one’s immigration views (0.098, p=0.561; –0.012, p=0.625). Meanwhile, contrary to theoretical expectations, a positive association between the frequency of church attendance and expressing economic concerns about immigration was found (0.085, p=0.004). There is no evidence, however, that church attendance is related to cultural concerns over immigration (–0.005, p=0.244). If one of the main mechanisms through which church-going fosters pro-immigrant attitudes in Western European countries is the exposure of church-goers to ‘civic moral values’ (Storm 2011: 206), this mechanism does not seem to be working in CEE countries. One possible explanation of this could be that, in some CEE countries, religious affiliation is an important element of national identity – and church-going in such a context may strengthen conservative national values as much as (if not more than) support for religious or ethnic diversity. Another characteristic of the CEE region which could be relevant for explaining the positive association between the frequency of church attendance and expressing economic concerns about immigration is the relatively low numbers of recent immigrants. If immigrants made up a more significant share of church-goers in CEE countries, this may lead to ‘increased solidarity towards immigrants and positive attitudes to immigration’ among native church-goers (Storm 2011: 190). Finally, while church-going may foster sympathy for Muslims as fellow religious practitioners in countries with significant shares of Muslim immigrants (Storm 2011: 209), this may not work in low-immigration CEE countries, where Muslims are often perceived as a ‘religious other’ or even a ‘threat’.

Nevertheless, the findings do not provide confirmation that immigration attitudes in CEE are affected by CEE residents’ trust in people of another religion (–0.100, p=0.275; 0.037, p=0.089). Broadly speaking, the results suggest that the angle of religion – while indeed important and deserving of further scholarly attention – is not the most important one for understanding immigration attitudes in CEE. Instead, immigration seems to be primarily viewed through the ethnic prism, as a low trust in people of another nationality emerged as the most important predictor of both economic and cultural concerns about immigration (–0.462, p=0.001; 0.055, p=0.004). Interestingly, even when controlling for the effect of trust in non-nationals, low general interpersonal trust is also associated with anti-immigration attitudes in CEE (–0.298, p=0.049; 0.066, p=0.039). Since 2 out of 3 social trust variables were found to be statistically significant, H8 is confirmed. Additionally, a statistically significant interaction between generalised interpersonal trust and the content of national identity was identified in the model on economic concerns over immigration (0.709, p=0.026). Namely, for people who trust others, the effect of espousing both voluntarist and ascriptive nationhood criteria on economic concerns over immigration is stronger than for those who do not trust others. For the latter group of people, the content of national identity may matter less as their views on immigration are largely steered by low social trust. Also, for voluntarist nationalists, the effect of interpersonal trust on economic concerns over immigration is stronger than for those who have a ‘thick’ conception of nationhood. Therefore, the study suggests that 2 key predictors of immigration attitudes in the region – social trust and the content of national identity – should not be viewed in isolation from each other.

Overall, both generalised interpersonal trust as well as trust in non-nationals is lower in CEE compared to Western and particularly Nordic Europe. While this is often linked to the atomising effect of the socialist era in CEE, post-communist transformation accompanied by rising unemployment, poverty and social inequalities could also have contributed to low levels of interpersonal trust in the region, not least by fostering survival values that tend to correlate with a perceived threat of foreigners and ethnic diversity (Rimac and Zrinščak 2010: 110–111). A lack of trust in non-nationals could also flow from the dominance of a ‘thick’ conception of nationhood which – as confirmed by this study – is also associated with anti-immigrant views. Low general interpersonal trust as well as trust in non-nationals may partly explain why anti-immigrant views are higher in CEE, although this hypothesis would need to be tested in future studies employing multi-level designs. Meanwhile, another basic human value – Universalism – was not related to immigration attitudes in CEE (0.005, p=0.943; –0.004, p=0.710), leading to the rejection of H9. H10 was also not supported, as the analysis did not generate evidence that would confirm the relationship between perceived state vulnerability and immigration attitudes in CEE (0.013, p=0.840; –0.007, p=0.621).

Education level and age were the only socio-demographic predictors found to be related to immigration attitudes. People with a higher education level were less likely to think that immigrants take jobs away from natives (0.120, p=0.000), while older respondents were more likely to mention immigrants/foreign workers as a group of people whom they would not like to have as neighbours (0.001, p=0.035). As expected, economic concerns over immigration in CEE were associated with negative attitudes towards competition (–0.082, p=0.006), support for income equality (0.120, p=0.001) and the prioritising of economic growth and job creation over the protection of the environment (–0.387, p=0.000). Total R-squared and pseudo R-squared values of the main models (0.15 and 0.107 respectively) indicate a moderate-to-low goodness of fit and correspond to those reported in other quantitative studies on immigration attitudes (e.g. Jeong 2016; Lancaster 2022). Neither of the 2 main models suffers from the multicollinearity problem, as testified by low variance inflation factor (VIF) scores.

Robustness test and country-specific analyses

To test the robustness of the results provided above, we assessed the extent to which model findings changed after excluding respondents from one selected country. In total, 10 fixed-effects regression models containing respondents from 9 CEE countries were run for each outcome measure (see Appendix C). The associations between multiple national identity and low trust in people of another nationality on the one hand and high economic and cultural concerns over immigration on the other remained statistically significant in these models. However, the association between high interpersonal trust and low concerns over immigration retained statistical significance only in 2 ‘drop-one’ models focusing on economic concerns and 5 models for cultural concerns. Therefore, this robustness test confirms that evidence on the positive association between general interpersonal trust and pro-immigration attitudes in CEE is not as strong as evidence on the effects of multiple national identity and trust in people of another nationality – and should, therefore, be subject to further tests using newer survey data.

To gain additional insights on the extent to which the effects of individual-level predictors differ by country, country-specific regression analyses were run (see Appendix B). Overall, important differences in coefficient estimates across countries were found, with some identified associations going against theoretical expectations. Interestingly, in Estonia and Lithuania, national pride was found to be statistically significantly associated with low concerns over the economic impact of immigration. Also, in Slovakia, respondents who belonged to the Christian denomination were less likely to mention immigrants among people whom they would not want to have as neighbours. It is also noteworthy that the effect of national identity content on immigration attitudes does not reach statistical significance in Visegrád countries, the sole exception being the model on economic concerns over immigration in Czechia. These additional analyses confirm that the importance of the various determinants of immigration attitudes is not the same in the different CEE countries, warranting further research into how national contexts shape these associations. For example, it could be hypothesised that a positive association between national pride and low economic concerns over immigration in Estonia and Lithuania is due to the fact that – at the time when EVS 2017 survey was conducted – these countries had relatively small immigrant populations as well as a comparatively low politicisation of the immigration issue. However, when focusing on important national characteristics, future studies should also assess the degree to which differences between countries could have been affected by comparability biases that often characterise analyses of cross-national survey data (Meitinger, Schmidt and Braun 2023: 493).

Discussion and conclusions

This study has found that the low trust in people of another nationality was statistically significantly associated with both economic and cultural concerns over immigration in CEE. Importantly, the main fixed-effects models additionally showed that low general interpersonal trust was also statistically significantly associated with concerns over immigration. While this finding is conceptually relevant and the interpretation of its meaning in the CEE context is provided below, the robustness tests conducted as part of this study call for further confirmation of this association in future research.¹⁰ Also, CEE residents subscribing to both voluntarist and ascriptive nationhood criteria are more likely to be concerned about the economic and cultural aspects of immigration than those having a purely voluntarist conception of nationhood. It was also found that not feeling close to Europe as well as frequently attending church are related to economic concerns over immigration; however, the evidence is not strong enough to conclude that these variables affect cultural concerns as well. Additional analyses focusing on separate CEE states showed that the size of the effects of these individual-level variables differed substantially between countries, thus illustrating the diversity of national contexts within the CEE region and calling for further research on how these associations are conditioned by specific country-level characteristics. A larger sample of countries would help to take this research field forward.

A generally low level of social trust found in CEE societies is inseparable from the often complex historical experiences that characterise this region. In particular, ‘the long-lasting impact of the communist period on the range of social values’ (Rimac and Zrinščak 2010: 107) – including interpersonal trust – is widely acknowledged both by ordinary citizens and by academics. In the communist era, the threat of state surveillance as well as the inability of the state to fully meet people’s economic and cultural needs led to the burgeoning of small ‘private circles, usually among family, relatives and close friends’ (Rimac and Zrinščak 2010: 108–109). In the prevailing atmosphere of fear, interpersonal trust was limited to these small circles and could not extend to broader society (Schwartz, Bardi and Bianchi 2000). Furthermore, post-communist transition brought considerable economic hardships and inequalities, creating a sizable group of ‘transformation losers’ and reinforcing ‘survival’ values that are hardly compatible with trust in others (Rimac and Zrinščak 2010: 110). Reflecting on these legacies is particularly useful for understanding the nexus between low interpersonal trust and economic concerns over immigration in CEE. Additionally, a low level of trust in people of another nationality could also be linked to oppression at the hands of multi-ethnic empires as well as an ethnocultural nationhood tradition. It is therefore hardly surprising that low interpersonal trust is associated not only with economic but also with cultural concerns over immigration.

The content of national identity is another variable that is strongly influenced by historical processes. The formation of ethnoculturally defined nations in the 19th century and the resulting ethnocultural nationhood tradition still affects the prevalence of alternative understandings of nationhood in CEE. On average, CEE countries have more residents espousing both voluntarist and ascriptive conceptions of nationhood than Western and Northern European countries (Bartasevičius 2023). Like interpersonal trust, the content of national identity is therefore closely intertwined with the region’s history and is unlikely to be subject to quick changes in time. Inasmuch as economic and cultural concerns over immigration are associated with social trust and definitions of nationhood, CEE residents’ attitudes towards immigration are unlikely to undergo a sudden improvement either. As emphasised by Sides and Citrin (2007), ‘creating more favourable attitudes towards immigration may require re-imagining national identities’ (478). Like efforts to improve interpersonal trust, this would be a slow process. In addition, it is by no means clear that CEE political elites would be willing to move away from ethnocultural understanding of nationhood given its effective track record of sustaining social solidarity in the region (Sides and Citrin 2007: 502).

Given that this research relies on regression models, the findings do not easily lend themselves to causal interpretation. While all of the main predictors included in the models measure core identities and value orientations which are unlikely to be heavily affected by people’s views on immigration, a certain degree of reverse causality is, nevertheless, possible. One way to avoid this issue in the future would be to adopt longitudinal and experimental research designs. Also, the EVS 2017 dataset did not allow me to conduct a more nuanced analysis of the correlates of immigration attitudes according to the type of immigration (e.g. labour or forced, coming from Europe or other continents etc.). Given how multi-faceted immigration is, looking into the determinants of various kinds of immigration may generate findings that are substantially different from those reported in this article. Generating policy-relevant insights into how CEE residents react to different types of migrant and what this reaction depends on could be one of the avenues for further work on immigration attitudes. Finally, as the sample of this study was limited to CEE residents, the paper does not claim that the main correlates of immigration concerns identified here are less relevant in Old Europe or elsewhere. Rather, the focus was not only on identifying significant correlates but also on revealing the region-specific meaning of these variables by showing how and why they matter in post-communist CEE. Future studies may use these findings to engage in further comparative work on immigration concerns in CEE and Old Europe.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleagues at IIRPS Department of Political Behaviour and Institutions and Prof. Ainė Ramonaitė in particular for providing valuable commentary on this research. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their important comments that helped improve this work. Any remaining omissions, drawbacks or errors are, of course, my own.

Funding

This work was funded by the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT) under postdoctoral fellowship No. S-PD-22-89 ‘How Do Deep-Seated Cultural Views Shape Immigration Attitudes in Europe? The Role of Nationhood Conceptions’.

Conflict of interest statement

No conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID ID

Vainius Bartasevičius  https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5112-6816

Notes

1. However, a recent conjoint experiment showed that individual preferences for asylum and refugee policy in Hungary and Poland were not so different from those found in Western Europe (Jeannet, Heidland, Ruhs 2021).
2. Latvia is a notable omission as it did not collect EVS data in 2017 or 2018.
3. While ethnic nationalism is based on the belief that a nation is, first and foremost, a community of presumed common descent, civic nationalism emphasises respect for the laws and institutions of the country as well as a feeling of being a member of the national group.
4. The term ‘multiple national identity’ was introduced by Hjerm (1998).
5. Documentation of the EVS 2017 Integrated dataset (full release): https://europeanvaluesstudy.eu/methodology-data-documentation/survey-2017/full-release-evs2017/documentation-survey-2017/
6. The key findings were robust to omitting these additional covariates.
7. Findings from the models with a single interaction term are available upon request.
8. Some 5,817 and 5,408 observations were excluded due to missing values in the main models for economic and cultural concerns over immigration respectively.
9. Here and below, the figures from the models on economic concerns are reported first and are followed by the output from the models on cultural concerns over immigration.
10. As explained in the previous section, while the coefficient sign for interpersonal trust remained the same after excluding respondents from one selected country, the required level of statistical significance was not reached in several ‘drop-one’ models.

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Appendix A. Census data on the ethnic composition of CEE countries

Appendix B. Regression models for separate countries

OLS regression models with the following outcome measure: assessment of whether immigrants take jobs away from natives

Notes: β coefficients are reported, with standard errors in the parentheses. ***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05.

Logistic regression models with the following outcome measure: would not like to have as neighbours – immigrants/foreign workers (mentioned/not mentioned)

Notes: β coefficients are reported, with standard errors in the parentheses. ***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05.

Appendix C. Regression models after excluding one country (robustness analysis)

Fixed-effects OLS regression models with the following outcome measure: assessment of whether immigrants take jobs away from natives

Notes: β coefficients are reported, with clustered standard errors in the parentheses. ***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05.

Fixed-effects logistic regression models with the following outcome measure: would not like to have as neighbours – immigrants/foreign workers (mentioned/not mentioned)

Notes: β coefficients are reported, with clustered standard errors in the parentheses. ***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05.

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