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Acta Sociologica

DOI: 10.1177/0001699308100633 2009; 52; 47 Acta Sociologica

Mikael Hjerm Immigrants

Anti-Immigrant Attitudes and Cross-Municipal Variation in the Proportion of

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ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 2009

Anti-Immigrant Attitudes and Cross-MunicipalVariation in the Proportion of Immigrants

Mikael HjermDepartment of Sociology, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

abstract: In this article, I set out to test a specific case of group threat theory, namelythe size of the minority population. My general aim is to test whether the proportionof immigrants in Swedish municipalities has any effect on anti-immigrant attitudes.More specifically, I examine whether visibility of immigrants matters, via countryof origin, as well as whether different contexts intensify the relation between size ofthe minority population and anti-immigrant attitudes. I conclude that the proportionof the foreign-born population has no effect on anti-immigrant attitudes, whereaspeople have fewer anti-immigrant attitudes in municipalities with a high proportionof the most visible groups of immigrants. A recent influx of immigrants to themunicipality does not matter for levels of anti-immigrant attitudes. However, theeconomic context matters in that anti-immigrant attitudes of people are strongestin poor municipalities with a large share of immigrants. The political context, onthe other hand, does not matter.

keywords: attitude ◆ group threat ◆ municipality ◆ prejudice ◆ racism ◆ xenophobia

Introduction

One special case of group threat theory stipulates that the majority are threatened by the sizeof one, or more, minority group(s) sharing the territory. In other words, the larger the minority,the more threatened and therefore the more averse the majority. The majority become aversebecause they perceive that their dominant social position is threatened by the minority due tothe groups fighting over scarce resources. Empirically, this has been shown to hold for therelationship between whites and blacks in the USA (Smith, 1981; Fosset and Kiecolt, 1989;Glaser, 1994; Quillian, 1996; Taylor, 1998, 2000), but is questionable when considering otherrelations and locations.

First, there is the problem of specific groups. It seems that the size argument can only explainthe relation between whites and blacks. Hood and Morris (1997), however, have shown thatattitudes towards immigration and immigrants relate negatively to the concentration of immi-grants in the USA. This is also the view of Taylor (1998), who has demonstrated that sizematters when dealing with black minorities, but does not influence white prejudice towardsimmigrant groups in the USA. Dixon and Rosenbaum (2004) have presented similar evidence.

Second, the size argument is not obvious outside the US context. Scheepers et al. (2002)report that the proportion of non-European Union (EU) citizens relates positively to attitudesto ethnic exclusion in Europe. Quillian (1995), likewise, suggests that this could be the case in

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Europe, but adds that size of the immigrant population seems to matter only when interactingwith the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and it is unclear whether size per se generatesantipathy towards immigrants. In the European context, Hjerm (2007) has shown that sizedoes not matter if non-Western countries are also taken into account. McLaren (2003), too, hasshown this indirectly when examining the contact hypothesis.

Third, the level of analysis is not theoretically obvious and arguments can be made fordifferent levels of analysis. The effect of size has therefore been studied at different levels; forinstance, at country level (Quillian, 1995; McLaren, 2003; Hjerm, 2007), at census region level(Quillian, 1996) and at county level in Blalock’s (1957) classic study. Other studies focus onmunicipalities or communities in the USA, with diverging results. Fosset and Kiecolt (1989)and Taylor (1998) have shown, using community/county data, that the proportion of blacksrelates positively to prejudice among whites. The results become more ambiguous whenmoving down the ladder in units of analysis. Oliver and Mendelberg (2000) found thatnegative stereotypes of blacks exist at a metropolitan level, but not at a zip-code level. Oliverand Wong (2003) argue that the degree of ethnic mix in various neighbourhoods is inverselyproportional to prejudice, while such a mix at a metropolitan level is directly proportional toprejudice, indicating that the level of analysis is fundamental to our study of the field.

All in all, there is an obvious lack of studies that place the size argument in a local contextoutside the USA. Therefore, in this article I set out to examine the size argument in groupthreat theory at a municipal level in a European context. The overall aim is to examine whetheranti-immigrant attitudes increase with the size of the minority population within municipal-ities in Sweden.

The reason for focusing on municipalities is to be found at the very heart of group threattheory. Blalock (1967) stated that the majority are threatened by a large minority due to thecompetition over scarce resources and out of fear for political action from the minority.Swedish municipalities constitute an arena where both economic and political threat from alarge minority population is salient. Municipalities collect income tax as well as provideservices such as schooling, elderly care and so on for their inhabitants, and it is obvious thatthe more affluent municipalities can provide a better service for their inhabitants.1 Moreover,municipalities are the basis for the local labour market. In other words, the struggle betweengroups of people over scarce resources to a large extent takes place within the municipalities.Municipalities are also an important political arena as a result of their substantial politicalpower. This includes, for example, self-determination over issues such as taxation, schooling,elderly care, roads and communications, energy issues, etc., but also administration of variouslicences and, not least, the implementation of national decision-making.2 Moreover, immi-grants have more political power within municipalities than at country level, as one need notbe a citizen to vote in municipal elections. In other words, the political threat to the majoritypopulation can be assumed to be large at the municipal level. As a consequence of both themunicipal economic responsibility and the political responsibility in general, as well as theintegration process, the radical right in Sweden has so far been unsuccessful at the nationallevel, but very successful at the municipal level. Their tactics have been to argue explicitly interms of scarce resources combined with scapegoating immigrants as being responsible forusing more than they put into the system. Combining the municipal economic arena, wheremuch of the struggle over scarce resources is taking place, with a political arena, where immi-gration issues are extremely salient, it is clear that the municipalities are an arena where bothof Blalock’s threat conditions are salient.

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Theories and hypotheses

Blumer (1958) identified group identity, out-group stereotyping, preferred group status andthe perceived threat as being intrinsic to prejudice. The fourth precondition, or the group threatcondition, states that prejudice is a reaction to explicit or implicit challenges to the dominantgroup’s position; it is the catalyst that makes the other three preconditions give rise toprejudice. It is therefore not surprising that so much focus has been directed at the fourthprecondition, which, according to Blumer, is so decisive. The so-called ‘group threat theory’assumes that individuals identify with one or more group and that the diverse interests ofdifferent groups generate conflicts that in turn generate negative attitudes. Or, more precisely,that people make group classifications that get political and economic saliency in that they aremore likely to want to benefit their own group over other groups in the struggle for scarceresources due to the desired status hierarchy for different groups. In terms of ethnicity andimmigration, this means that one or more minority groups threaten the majority, a situationwhich elicits anti-immigrant attitudes among members of the majority group.3

There is a vast body of empirical evidence to show that various forms of group threat affectnegative attitudes towards minority groups.4 The classic empirical example of group threattheory is Bobo’s (1983) study of the conveying of white schoolchildren by bus to black neigh-bourhoods in the USA. His research showed that white parents strongly opposed busing whereit concerned their own children despite their advocacy of general principles of equality betweenethnic groups. The interpretation is that they experienced a threat towards their group positionand reacted accordingly. Quillian (1995) shows that GDP interacts with the proportion ofimmigrants to produce anti-minority prejudice in Europe. The less the majority feel that theirjobs are in jeopardy, the more likely they are to be in favour of, or at least not against, increasedlevels of immigration (Espenshade and Hempstead, 1996). Similarly, the more people thinkthat immigrants are likely to compete for jobs, the more likely they are to support reducedlevels of immigration (Fetzer, 2000). There is a theoretical difference between Bobo (1983), forexample, and authors like Fetzer, in that the former comes from the ‘realistic group threattheory’ school (see also Bobo, 1983; Sears and Jessor, 1996), according to which anti-immigrantattitudes are the result of real experiences and interests, while the latter claims that whatmatters is not whether threats are real or not, but that they are perceived as such.

A special case of group threat theory, and one that has gained a vast amount of attention,concerns the proportion of a minority group living within a certain territory or area. Accordingto the group threat theory, it is assumed that the larger the minority group(s), the greater thethreat and, correspondingly, the greater the antipathy felt towards them. Blalock (1967) givestwo reasons why the majority are expected to feel threatened by the relative size of a minority:first, the larger the group, the fiercer the competition for scarce resources; and second, thelarger the group, the greater the potential for collective (political) action against the majority.In other words, the majority apply a two-pronged reasoning comprising a ‘rational choice’explanation and an ‘identity politics’ explanation. Two articles, one by Blalock (1957) and oneby Pettigrew (1957), have laid the groundwork for this version of group threat theory.5 Certainpreconditions need to be fulfilled, however, in order for size to be a justifiable indicator ofgroup threat, i.e. preconditions that can be derived into testable hypotheses.

First, we set out to test the size argument in group threat theory in a European context at amunicipal level. It is clear that rigid boundaries must exist between the groups for group threattheory to be in effect. The more closed boundaries between the groups are (perceived or real),the more difficult it is for members to migrate from one group to the other, and, consequently,the stronger the significance of the in-group. Studies on contact theory have shown that deepcontacts diminish threats and anti-immigrant attitudes, while shallower contacts can have theopposite effect (Brewer and Miller, 1988; Dixon, 2006). This is one of the possible explanations

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as to why, in the USA, size seems to matter at a city level, but not at lesser levels of analysis.As in the USA, Swedish municipalities are segregated when it comes to housing as well as tothe labour market, income, living standards, and so on. This means that there is plenty of roomfor knowing that the other group exists and for shallow contacts, but little room for deepercontacts. There are, in other words, rigid boundaries between immigrants and non-immigrantsin Sweden. We therefore expect that individuals have stronger anti-immigrant attitudes inmunicipalities where the proportion of immigrants is high.

Hypothesis 1: The larger the proportion of immigrants in a municipality, the stronger the anti-immigrant attitudes.

Second, the minority group needs to be visible. Allport’s (1954 [1979]) classic position is thatthe degree of visibility of the minority is decisive. It is not enough for the majority to know abouttheir existence; they need to have a high degree of visibility within the boundaries of the majoritygroup’s sphere of activity. This is one possible explanation for the fact that whites in the USAare more prejudiced towards blacks and less towards immigrants or other minority groups. Withhigher visibility comes a higher perception of threat. In Sweden, there are no large racial groups(other than the majority population), i.e. like the blacks in the USA, but it is still reasonable toassume that the more visible groups of immigrants are those that are perceived to be the mostsocially distant. The majority’s understanding of social distance in Sweden is that people fromoutside Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand are perceived as the most alike andother groups as more distant (Lange and Westin, 1993; Hjerm, 2005). It is therefore likely thatpeople are threatened to different degrees depending on where the immigrants originate from.

Hypothesis 2: The larger the proportion of visible immigrants,6 the stronger the anti-immigrantattitudes.

Third, and linked to visibility, is context dependency. Group threat cannot operate if theright contexts do not exist. In this case I am considering two contexts, namely economic andpolitical. It can be derived from group threat theory that people have fewer negative attitudesin richer municipalities, since competition for scarce resources is less tangible. For example,the likelihood of finding a job diminishes if there are fewer jobs available. More important forus is that the economic context is expected to intensify the relationship between the proportionof immigrants and anti-immigrant attitudes. The reason is that the majority fear they will losetheir economic advantage (dominant position), which is accentuated by a larger immigrantgroup as the threat is perceived to be larger. Quillian (1995, 1996) has shown that economiccircumstances are extremely important in whether size matters on a country level. Politicalcontexts can also matter; Blumer (1958) argues that out-groups are defined through interactionbetween members of the majority. It is the dominant people and institutions that express,constitute and consolidate views about the minority. So, unless there is no articulation of thegroup difference, no threat situation can exist. Conversely, in a context where such actions andarticulations are more averse towards minorities, we expect the majority to have stronger anti-immigrant attitudes. On a country level it has been argued that political context matters forindividual sentiments towards immigrants (Bauer et al., 2000), since people tend to be lessxenophobic in countries with generous immigration and integration policies (Hjerm, 2004).Rydgren (2003) indicates, similarly, that the existence of right-wing populism increases thelevel of racism in a country. In this case, municipalities are seen as discursive communitiesthat expose individuals to particular political ideologies (Johnston and Pattie, 1998). In general,we expect anti-immigrant attitudes to be more pronounced in conservative municipalities, asthe conservative parties in Sweden have traditionally been less benevolent towards immigrants.

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However, the point here is to examine whether the threat from the size of the immigrant popu-lation varies in different political contexts, where we expect a large immigrant population andpolitical conservatism to intensify.

Hypothesis 3a: The proportion of immigrants relates positively to anti-immigrant attitudes inless affluent municipalities.

Hypothesis 3b: The proportion of immigrants relates positively to anti-immigrant attitudes inmore conservative municipalities.

Fourth, combining the size of the threat with the visibility argument, above, it is clear thatchanging circumstances can increase awareness and strengthen anti-immigrant attitudes. Forexample, if the influx of immigrants is high, visibility increases, which may result in anincrease in anti-immigrant attitudes. The threat is more obvious in the case of high influx thanin more steady growth, as people have had less time to adapt. Olzak (1992) has shown thatrising competition over scarce resources has negative consequences for immigrants. Coendersand Scheepers (1998) have provided empirical evidence for this at an individual level, butfailed to find any contextual effects of changes in unemployment in a cross-country compari-son (Scheepers et al., 2002). The influx of immigrants to a country varies over time and theinflux to the municipalities is not evenly distributed, which means that the concentration ofimmigrants increases more rapidly in certain municipalities than in others. It is in the highinflux municipalities where we expect anti-immigrant attitudes to be most prevalent.

Hypothesis 4: The larger the increase in the proportion of immigrants the greater the anti-immigrant attitudes.

Individual characteristicsGroup threat theory is a theory of threatened group positions, but one that acknowledges anindividual’s position within the ethnic group varies with various social characteristics. Or, inother words, individuals who have a more vulnerable position in society are more likely toperceive higher degrees of threat and, correspondingly, to be more averse towards immigrants.Given the extensive knowledge base that individual effects have on anti-immigrant attitudesand the focus of this article, I do not hypothesize about individual effects any more than Iexpect anti-immigrant attitudes to increase with increasing individual vulnerability. My focusis on the specific condition of group threat, constituted by minority group size, as the hypothe-ses deal with the effects of certain structural conditions on attitudes rather than the effects ofindividual characteristics. Still, the individual-level indicators need to be included in order toavoid the risk that the effect of group-level indicators is wrongly estimated. For example, if acertain individual-level indicator has a strong effect while this characteristic is unevenlydistributed across the municipalities, then this could be a reason for the municipal-level differ-ences. The latter is something that clearly has to be avoided.

Data and method

An empirical problem with testing the size argument in group threat theory at a municipallevel is that we need a large dataset which at the same time is sufficiently fine-tuned to classifyindividuals into municipalities. The dataset also has to cover questions of anti-immigrantattitudes. All these demands together are very rarely met, which has hampered research inthe field. The solution in the present investigation is to collapse data from three rounds of theEuropean Social Survey (ESS): ESS1 (2002) ESS2 (2004) and ESS3 (2006).7

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The ESS is a comparative attitude and behavioural survey conducted in about 30 Europeancountries. It is carried out every second year and consists of a comprehensive base moduleencompassing standardized background variables as well as numerous central attitudes,values and behavioural questions. Added to this are two thematic modules that are rotatedbetween the survey periods. In terms of all aspects, from survey construction and translationto sampling, data collection and supplementary work, the ESS is by far the most thorough andstandardized cross-country comparative project of this nature yet undertaken. Sweden followsthe general standards for ESS. Random individual sampling from national registers for thepopulation above 16 years of age was used and the sample size is 3000 individuals per roundof ESS. Data are collected by Statistics Sweden via face-to-face interviews and the responserates are approximately 67 per cent for all three surveys.

Collapsing data from three rounds of the ESS solves the problem of size of the dataset aswell as the issue of questions about anti-immigrant attitudes. The problem is that the ESS doesnot generally contain information on municipal belonging, which rules out any cross-countrycomparative approach.8 However, we do have this information for Sweden. Collapsing thedata from the ESS1, 2 and 3 for Sweden gives us a dataset of about 6,000 cases. In order toavoid contaminating the analysis with immigrants’ attitudes towards themselves, all indi-viduals not born in Sweden were excluded, leaving a new file containing 5,256 cases (so-calledsecond-generation immigrants are controlled for in the analysis).

The data are analysed using multi-level modelling (MLM) or a hierarchical linear model(see Singer, 1998; Snijders and Bosker, 1999; Hox, 2002). MLM assumes that individuals interactwith the social context in which they belong, which is an empirical way of understanding therelationship between the structure and the individual. If the objective is to analyse individualattitudes or country-level differences in isolation, a multi-level analysis is not needed. However,in this case I am interested in macro-level effects on individual outcome.

I use a hierarchical linear model, which is effectively a multiple regression analysis that canhandle nested sources of variability, such as individuals in municipalities. Use of this type ofmodelling provides an empirical advantage over regression analysis in that it does not under-estimate standard errors, which would be the case if macro-level variables were to be includedin an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis owing to the lack of variability in themacro-level indicators. It also has a theoretical advantage, namely that group threat theory isa theory of groups and we therefore need to be able to draw conclusions at this level of analysisin order to avoid the ecological (interpreting aggregated data at an individual level) andatomistic (interpreting individual data at a higher level) fallacies. A common problem withMLM is that the N is often too small. This is not a problem here, as I am dealing with all themunicipalities in Sweden; 289 in number. Because of the number of municipalities, and thedifferences in size between them, it is obvious that the small n is quite small in certain munic-ipalities.9 The average number of cases is 18.2 per municipality, but naturally there are fewercases in some of the smaller municipalities. The largest municipality is Stockholm, with approx-imately 750,000 inhabitants, and the smallest Bjurholm with approximately 2,600 in 2002. How-ever, I am mainly interested in the macro-effects and it makes sense in terms of minimizingstandard errors to maximize the large N on behalf of the small n (Snijders and Bosker, 1999).

Anti-immigrant attitudesAntipathy to immigrants can take the form of negative attitudes such as prejudice, xenophobiaand racism, as well as an unwillingness to support actions to remedy segregation and increaseequality between ethnic groups. There is a qualitative difference between such negativeattitudes and the support for legal frameworks (for example) to remedy discrimination, as thesymbolic theories have shown. Still, group threat theory implies that group threat influencesattitudes to immigrants as well as policies. Wilson (2001: 486) is correct in stating that:

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Group threat theory is a general perspective, so the link it specifies between dominants’ threat percep-tions and their attitudes toward subordinates should apply to native-born Americans’ attitudestowards immigrants and immigration policies.

Applying this reasoning to a wider context, group threat theory (in this case the proportionof foreign-born people) should predict a variety of antagonistic attitudes towards immigrants.This is also obvious in the way outcome has been measured in relation to group threat theory.Blumer (1958) used the notion of prejudice as the dependent ‘variable’ in his group threattheory, but in his context the notion of prejudice would be better understood as antipathies oras a general set of negative attitudes towards ‘others’. Similarly, Blalock (1957) used racialdiscrimination, Fosset and Kiecolt (1989) views on integration, Scheepers et al. (2002) ethnicexclusion, Taylor (1998) the notion of prejudice, and so on. The general idea is that group threatrelates to a general set of negative attitudes about minority groups, not that it relates to aspecific set of beliefs. In the present investigation, I use the notion of anti-immigrant attitudes.Three items are available in all three rounds of the ESS, namely:

1. Would you say it is generally bad or good for [country]’s economy that people come to livehere from other countries?

2. Would you say that [country]’s cultural life is generally undermined or enriched by peoplecoming to live here from other countries?

3. Is [country] made a worse or a better place to live in by people coming to live here fromother countries?

All responses to the questions range from 0 to 10 on an 11-point scale. The three questionsproduce a one-factor solution (principal component analysis). Cronbach’s alpha is 0.83. Thus,it is clear that the items measure one and the same dimension. Correlations between singleitems and the index are similar, indicating that they have a similar impact. Most people simplydo not make a distinction between the items included here; people are either positive ornegative towards immigrants in general. The items were compiled within an additive indexstandardized to range from 0 to 100, in which the higher the value the stronger the anti-immigrant attitude.

Individual level indicators

Education: This classic variable has been shown repeatedly across space and time to corre-late negatively with anti-immigrant attitudes (e.g. Smith, 1981; Hjerm, 2001; Coenders andScheepers, 2003),10 a result that is often explained by the liberalizing effect of education.Education is measured in terms of the number of years that an individual has attended full-time schooling. In terms of group threat theory, highly educated people are predicted to feelless threatened by a large minority.

Age: The effect of age on anti-immigrant attitudes has been demonstrated in cross-comparative research (e.g. Case et al., 1989). Older people generally display higher levels ofanti-immigrant attitudes, although the reasons are not conclusive because of the lack of studiesseparating life-cycle from cohort and period effects. It could be that age is a proxy variable forgeneral liberalization, or that age in fact measures changes in an individual’s psychologicalmake-up over a life-cycle or that people are simply less vulnerable during different stages ofthe life course. This study cannot solve this issue other than take age into account as a controlvariable, as the age composition varies substantially across municipalities.

Sex: Few but the classic studies (Adorno et al., 1982 [1950]) have attempted to explain whysex should have an effect on anti-immigrant attitudes. Many studies simply conclude that it

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is of little (Quillian, 1995; Hjerm, 2001) or no (Scheepers et al., 2002) importance in explaininganti-immigrant attitudes. However, in terms of group threat, women are predicted to be lessthreatened than men, as their labour market situation is less exposed to competition due tothe gender division across sectors in Sweden.

Household income: The less affluent a household, the more averse the attitudes towards others.Household income is measured on a 12-point scale in all the countries examined.11

Economic deprivation: Affluence is one thing, but the feeling of deprivation is another. Thisis measured as the respondent’s feeling about the household’s income today, from ‘livingcomfortably’ to ‘very difficult to cope on present income’, on a 5-point scale.

Unemployment: I expect unemployed individuals to have stronger anti-immigrant attitudes,as they are more vulnerable to threats. The individuals are either unemployed or employed.

Second-generation immigrants: I don’t want to exclude second-generation immigrants from theanalysis owing to problems with demarcation, i.e. why not exclude people with immigrantgrandparents, and so on. Still, I do expect them to have different attitudes while being distrib-uted unequally across municipalities and therefore I control whether or not the mother and/orthe father are born in Sweden.

Contextual indicatorsFor an empirical description of the contextual indicators, see the Appendix.

Proportion of foreign-born individuals: Two different proportions are used to enable testing ofhypotheses 1 (H1) and 2 (H2). In order to test H1, size of the minority group(s) is operational-ized as the total proportion of foreign-born people living within the municipality. To test H2,size is operationalized as the proportion of people living in the municipality, born in Africa,Asia or South America. Data on the proportion of foreign-born individuals come from registerdata of the entire population from Statistics Sweden (for the year 2002).

Economic context variables: To avoid any problems with specific indicators, I test two similar,but different, economic indicators. The first is the percentage of unemployment in the munic-ipality (average figures between 1996 and 2002);12 the second is the average tax power stan-dardized to vary around 100 (the richer the municipality the higher the value). Both theseindicators are collected from Statistics Sweden.

Political context: I use average voting for the right-wing parties in municipal elections since1975 to operationalize the political context. The choice of time-span reflects a desire to capturethe long-term political climate, i.e. not any specific policy changes. The reason for choosingthe right-wing parties is that in Sweden these parties are, on average, less supportive of multi-culturalism than are the left-wing parties. The latter are measured via the positive articulationof multiculturalism at the national level (see the manifesto data in Klingemann et al. (2006)).This is not automatically transferable to the municipal level of articulation, but it is the bestapproximation I could get. The data come from general election data.

Change in proportion of the foreign-born population: Change in the proportion of foreign-bornindividuals is measured via the percentage difference between 1992 and 2002. For the fewmunicipalities that did not exist in 1992, I use any change that has taken place since they cameinto existence. I do not measure any change in the outcome variable – only if recent changes

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(understood as an increase in visibility) have an impact independently of actual circumstances.It is important to note that the change over this time period across municipalities variessubstantially, which makes it possible actually to assess whether this has an impact or not.

Results

The first model (Model 0) to be tested is the ‘empty model’, which is the one without anymunicipal-level or individual-level indicators (see Table 1). The point of using this model isto ascertain whether there is any municipal-level variance at all. If this is not the case thenthere is no need for MLM, since a standard OLS regression would result in the same output.Approximately 5 per cent of the variance in anti-immigrant attitudes can be attributed to themunicipal level and about 95 per cent to the individual level.13 There is, in other words,variation at the municipal level that needs to be explained.

Looking at the individual indicators in Model 1 we see that highly educated people andpeople with a healthy private economy have fewer anti-immigrant attitudes than others. Inother words, people in less vulnerable positions display lower levels of anti-immigrantattitudes.14 Five extra years of schooling decreases anti-immigrant attitudes by almost fiveunits on a scale ranging from 0 to 100. Middle-aged individuals are the least averse towardsimmigrants, while the elderly and the youngest of a population are the most averse, which isalso in accordance with the notion of vulnerability.15 Second-generation immigrants display,as expected, a lower level of anti-immigrant attitudes than individuals with both parents bornin the country. We can also see that anti-immigrant attitudes have actually increased duringthe period of measurement – people have higher levels of anti-immigrant attitudes in 2006(ESS3) than people had in 2002 (ESS1).

The first hypothesis is faulty in that the proportion of foreign-born people in the municipal-ities does not have any significant effect on anti-immigrant attitudes. The lack of effect of theproportion of foreign-born people could be due to the fact that the boundaries betweenforeign-born and domestic-born individuals are not rigid enough in the study population.Therefore, I set out to test whether a reclassification of ‘foreign-born’ would produce differentresults, or, in other words, I proceeded to test the second hypothesis.

Contrary to H2, there is actually a negative effect of the proportion of foreign-born indi-viduals from Africa, Asia or South America. The effect is more than marginal considering themost extreme municipalities (7.8 units of difference in anti-immigrant attitudes), but cuttingout the two most extreme municipalities the difference becomes approximately 3 units. Still,the effect is significant. In terms of group threat theory, this is clearly an anomaly and notreadily explained. So, contrary to what was expected, it seems that visibility actually dimin-ishes anti-immigrant attitudes in this case. Possible explanations for the negative effect are,precisely, the extreme segregation, poor living conditions, low participation in the politicalprocess, and so on. The Swedish people may perceive these groups as socially distant, but thatthey do not pose any threat because they cannot get the Swedes’ jobs nor do they have anypolitical power – in other words, they have no resources to compete for scarce resources. Thisis just a tentative explanation; possibly a more plausible interpretation is that group threattheory is mistaken. I am at this point content with dismissing the second hypothesis andmoving on to assess the contextual circumstances.

In Model 3, I test the hypothesis that the proportion of foreign-born people has an effect onanti-immigrant attitudes in specific contexts (see Table 1). I test the economic context via bothunemployment and taxation power in the municipalities. Both Model 3a.1 and 3a.2 displaysimilar results, namely that there are significant interaction effects between the proportion offoreign-born people and the economic contexts. People have stronger anti-immigrant attitudesin municipalities where unemployment is high and the proportion of foreign-born people is

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Acta Sociologica 52(1)

56

Tabl

e 1

Fixe

d an

d ra

ndom

effe

cts

of th

e m

ulti

-lev

el m

odel

s (n

= 5

256

indi

vidu

als,

N =

289

mun

icip

alit

ies)

Mod

el 0

Mod

el 1

Mod

el 2

Mod

el 3

a.1

Mod

el 3

a.2

Mod

el 3

bM

odel

4

Ind

ivid

ual i

ndic

ator

sW

omen

––1

.16*

–1.1

6*–1

.16*

–1.1

5*–1

.16*

–1.1

7*E

duc

atio

n–

–0.9

2**

–0.9

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large.16 Or, alternatively, people have stronger anti-immigrant attitudes in municipalitieswhere the taxation power is low and the proportion of foreign-born people is large. It isobvious that the threat from immigrants is larger when the competition over scarce resourcesis more salient. Model 3b takes the political context into account in testing H3b. It seems thatthe political context matters in that anti-immigrant attitudes increase with an increasingproportion of right-wing votes if the proportion of foreign-born is low (approximately below5 per cent), whereas a higher proportion of right-wing votes diminishes anti-immigrantattitudes in municipalities with a high density of immigrants. This seems initially to go againstthe proposed hypothesis, but the explanation is to be found in the economy of the municip-alities, as more affluent municipalities tend to be more conservative. In other words, if wecontrol for taxation power in Model 3b the effects from the political context disappear (notdisplayed in the table). Moreover, the political context, as measured in this case, does not byitself have any effect on anti-immigrant attitudes (not displayed in the table). I thereforeconclude that the political context, as measured here, is of little consequence.

The fourth hypothesis sets out to test the effect of changes in the proportion of foreign-bornpeople. There is no effect of a recent change in the proportion of foreign-born individuals perse on anti-immigrant attitudes. Moreover, there is no interaction effect between changes in theproportion of foreign-born individuals and the starting proportion of foreign-born people (notdisplayed in the table), which means that neither the change itself nor the relative change haveany effect on anti-immigrant attitudes. In other words, the threat is not intensified by a recentincrease in the proportion of foreign-born individuals within a municipality. If we were to testrecent changes in the economic context combined with recent changes in the proportion offoreign-born population we get the same results as for the fixed figures, namely that pooreconomic development and a large increase in the immigrant population intensify each otherto produce higher levels of anti-immigrant attitudes (not displayed in the table).

Concluding discussion

The proportion of foreign-born individuals residing within a municipality does not affect theanti-immigrant attitudes of the people in that municipality, nor do any changes or relativechange in the proportion of foreign-born people. It is often argued in US research that histori-cally shaped, culturally rooted racial hierarchies have shaped whites’ perception of threat tobe worst towards blacks, i.e. that whites feel most averse towards blacks. Even though suchracial hierarchies may or may not be as prevalent in Europe and Sweden as in the USA, weat least have a situation where the lack of integration and social distance coincide to definenon-Europeans, or people from the Western world, as being most negatively visible.

This means that even though the proportion of foreign-born people does not affect anti-immigrant attitudes we would expect that a high percentage of the most visible groups offoreign-born people would have an effect on anti-immigrant attitudes. This is not the case, asthe proportion of foreign-born people from Africa, Asia and South America in fact correlatesnegatively with anti-immigrant attitudes and thus, once again, brings the general applicabilityof group threat theory into question. Moreover, I do question the idea of the size of the minorityas the per se threat factor. This is not to say that I have proved group threat theory to be faulty,as it clearly has some merits. The problem is that the threat part of group threat theory hasbeen equalized with the size of a minority group within a given geographical territory. Thelatter view is empirically wrong, or at least not applicable outside the limited black and whiterelation in the USA. However, this is not to say that there are not other threats and combina-tions of threats that should be considered.

Group threat theory stipulates that the threat is more likely to exist under certain circum-stances. Contexts that produce a real or perceived struggle over scarce resources are more likely

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to produce a threat situation. This is clearly the case, as the proportion of foreign-born peopleinteract with negative economic contexts to produce an increasing risk of anti-immigrantattitudes. In other words, people are more likely to hold anti-immigrant attitudes if they livein a poor municipality with a large proportion of foreign-born people. However, the proportionof foreign-born people has negative consequences only once the level of unemployment reachesapproximately 9 per cent. The effect becomes more acute if the level of unemploymentreaches 15 per cent or more. The struggle over scarce resources becomes more prevalent and,consequently, immigrants are seen to be both those to compete with (struggle over scarceresources) and the source of the current economic situation (scapegoating). The same goes forrecent changes, as a high influx of foreign-born people combined with poor economic develop-ment produces anti-immigrant attitudes. A conservative political context seemed initially tobe of importance in that people have stronger anti-immigrant attitudes in a more conserva-tive municipality, where the density of immigrants is low and vice versa when the density ishigh. However, these effects proved to be dependent on economic circumstances. The resultsare largely comparable with empirical investigations in a US context. However, we still cannotmake the claim about contextual explanations that Pettigrew (2000) makes for individualexplanations of anti-immigrant attitudes; namely, that they are cross-nationally very similar.We have only begun to contribute to a more general understanding of the phenomenon underdiscussion. An important diverging result of US research is that the country of origin of theforeign-born seems to be fundamentally different from that in previous US research. Eventhough it may be assumed that visibility is lower for a number of reasons in the Swedish casethan in the white versus black situation in the USA, it cannot be neglected that perceived socialdistance, actual degrees of segregation and physical markers are manifest in non-Westernimmigrants in Sweden, which are factors likely to generate anti-immigrant attitudes. Apossible explanation put forward is that the group is more visible but actually poses less of athreat in the struggle for scarce resources in that its members have clearly less access to theeconomic as well as the political arena. Or, in other words, they have no resources to competefor scarce resources and are thus perceived as less threatening. If this, tentative, interpretationis correct, it is problematic, as it would imply that anti-immigrant attitudes would increasewith increasing resources among immigrants. This is not to say that a more successful inte-gration process would lead to more anti-immigrant attitudes. The latter implies equal oppor-tunities as well as integration within the Swedish welfare state and civic society, a situationthat facilitates processes such as increasing individual inter-ethnic contacts that we knowcounteract feelings of group threat. No, the problem is a situation where material affluencewould coincide with continued segregation (housing, work, etc.), as it is in this situation thatthe majority would perceive the threat as immanent.17

I do not claim to have explained all sources of threat, but models 3a and 3b, for example,reduce the unexplained variance by more than 30 per cent. The threat factors examined areclearly not insignificant in explaining differences in anti-immigrant attitudes between peopleliving in different municipalities. Still, further research is needed in a number of areas. First,we need to take into account other contexts that can enforce a threat situation. An example ofthe latter would be political articulation and immigration politics, which have been shown tohave an effect at national level (Hjerm, 2007). I tried to control for the political climate in themunicipalities, but the variable used was not optimal. Even though the size of the minoritygroup may be of little or no importance it is still important to expand our focus and movebeyond size as the threat factor per se and start to examine other important contexts.

Second, we need to disentangle the possible relationship between anti-immigrant attitudesand the rise of the radical Right, which is manifest all around Europe. The rise of the radicalRight is not evenly distributed across municipalities, but is often concentrated in immigrant-dense and poor areas in Sweden as well as in other European countries. It is possible that this

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rise is a response to a struggle over the political resources or that threat drives anti-immigrantattitudes, which in turn drives the empowerment of the radical Right. Regardless of which, itis obvious that this needs to be put under scrutiny.

Third, we need a better understanding of how different kinds of threat work in differententities. For example, the proportion of immigrants at a country level does not have the sameeffect as the proportion of immigrants within municipalities and within neighbourhoods. Thiscould be related to the contact hypothesis. Owing to segregation, foreign-born people areconsidered to be ‘others’ in municipalities and countries, but such a distinction is much moredifficult to sustain in small neighbourhoods. None the less, this needs to be explored in depth.

Fourth, if the difference in the effects on anti-immigrant attitudes between different groupsof immigrants can be explained by the lack of threat, due to marginalization, from the mostvisible groups, then we need to examine what will happen if the latter groups of peopleachieve a better potential to compete for scarce resources. In other words, we need a betterunderstanding of the conditions under which different groups are perceived as the mostthreatening to the majority.

Fifth, we need similar studies but not restricted to one country. There is reason to suspectthat these results are not restricted to Sweden, as the radical Right has had more success allover Europe in poor economic areas with large proportions of immigrants. However, this isnot conclusive evidence and more comparative studies need to be undertaken to furtherenhance our understanding of the subject.

I strongly question the size argument within group threat theory on the basis of the empiricalfindings provided. However, I do acknowledge that group threat theory, in combination withother theoretical frameworks, can provide a sound basis for a better understanding of theimportance of the various contextual factors that help sustain or alternatively counteract anti-immigrant attitudes.

NotesThis research was sponsored by the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research (FAS).

1. There is a programme for monetary redistribution across municipalities to counter the effect ofpopulation compositions, but this only diminishes the effect somewhat.

2. For example, municipalities are responsible for asylum-seekers coming to the country, which maybe of special importance in this case.

3. The main difference between group threat theory and the so-called ‘symbolic’ theories in explaininganti-immigrant attitudes is what is in focus. The symbolic theories (e.g. Kinder and Sanders, 1996;Meertens and Pettigrew, 1997; Sears et al., 1997; Henry and Sears, 2002; Sears and Henry, 2003) focuson individual psychological processes, in which anti-immigrant attitudes are the result of divergent,non-complementary attitudes of the individual. Group threat theory, by contrast, focuses on relationsbetween groups. It is assumed, for example, that the threat is larger during a recession, whichaggravates anti-immigrant attitudes. There are differences between these two theories, but it is obvious

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59

Appendix Description of contextual indicators

Mean Min Max St. dev.

Foreign-born 10.81 0 38.20 5.75Foreign-born (Africa, Asia, South America) 1.61 0 12.44 1.78Level of unemployment 7.77 1.88 19.66 2.35Taxation power 100 75 189 14.37Right-wing voting 46.20 14.80 78.90 8.61Change foreign-born 3.06 –1.00 24.00 1.80

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that the same result can sometimes be explained by both theories. On examining a Californianreferendum from a symbolic perspective, Sawires and Peacock (2000) concluded that a group threatexplanation would have been equally possible.

4. See Esposito and Murphy (1999) for a critique of contemporary ways of empirically testing Blumer’sgroup threat theory.

5. The size argument was developed much earlier by Moreno (1953 [1934]) in his 1934 theory of saturationpoint, where a certain proportion of minority is needed for the majority to treat them negatively. Thisidea has now disappeared and the size argument is put forward simply in an additive way.

6. By visible immigrants I mean immigrants from outside Western Europe, USA, Canada, Australia andNew Zealand.

7. www.europeansocialsurvey.org8. The smallest geographical division in ESS is the NUTS2 regions.9. Due to the random sampling procedure.

10. Still, there are studies questioning the generality of this conclusion in relating education to biasedanswering (Jackman and Muha, 1984).

11. Because of the ESS way of measuring household income via an interval scale it is not possible tocorrect this for household composition in any meaningful way, which makes it a non-perfect variable.Still, it can be seen as a combination of income and household composition.

12. In order to avoid specific changes that can have effect, especially in smaller municipalities.13. The so-called intra-class correlation is calculated by dividing the variance at the municipal level by

the total variance.14. Women are less vulnerable than men in Sweden due to their working to a greater extent in the public

sector and thus less exposed to the struggle over scarce resources during, for example, times ofrecession.

15. The effect of age becomes significant if we exclude the unemployed/employed indicator. The reasonis simply that the risk of being unemployed correlates with age, because the youngest and the oldesthave not entered the labour market or alternatively have exited from it.

16. It is important to note that I am holding individual variables constant, i.e. it is not individual compo-sition effects that explain this relationship. For example, differences in levels of education acrossmunicipalities cannot explain this relationship.

17. With this, I am NOT claiming that it would be better to keep groups of immigrants poor if we cannotsolve the segregation problem as a mean to counteract anti-immigrant attitudes, as the latter problemshould not be compared to problems of equal opportunities and life satisfaction in liberal society.

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Biographical Note: Mikael Hjerm is an Associate Professor in the sociology department, Umeå University.He is the national coordinator for ESS and is currently involved in research around nationalism andxenophobia.

Address: Mikael Hjerm, Department of Sociology, Umeå University, SE-90187 Umeå, Sweden. [email:mikael.hjerm@soc.umu.se]

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