Individual and contextual explanations of attitudes toward immigration

Contemporary societies are more and more culturally diverse, largely due to immigration. At the same time anti-immigrant attitudes are arising and right-wing populist parties are gaining support. Uncovering the multiple reasons that explain the raise of intolerance is a major challenge. This chapter introduces multilevel research examining the interplay of individual and contextual accounts of anti-immigration attitudes and radical right-wing voting. This approach allows examining how individuals’ attitudes are shaped by the socio-structural (e.g., immigrant ratio) and normative contexts (e.g., prevailing values) in which they develop, over and above the individual-level determinants of these attitudes (e.g., threat perceptions, personal experiences with immigrants, ideological orientations such as national attachment). The development of large-scale international social surveys has enabled comparative research between and within nations, that takes into account the impact of contextual factors on individual-level processes. Moreover, the necessary multilevel research designs can now be implemented with a number of statistical software packages. Our recent research conducted in Switzerland—a country with large immigrant presence—is presented to exemplify this research approach