Individual Similarities and Regional Differences: The Impact of 2015 Refugee Crisis in Europeans’ Attitudes toward Immigration

Do all Europeans experience the same shockwaves that the 2015 refugee crisis sent throughout the continent? The existing literature has found much similarities in causal factors and correlates of individual attitudes toward immigration to Europe, yet there is much less attention on regional-based attitudes. We try to unpack this puzzle by accounting for variations that the 2015 refugee crisis caused to Europeans in three geopolitical regions of the continent, namely EU member countries from former communist Eastern Europe, EU member countries from Western Europe, and non-EU member countries from Western Europe. We test our hypotheses with a dataset that combines data from the 7th and 8th rounds of the European Social Survey, which happened in 2014 and 2016, respectively. Our multilevel regression analysis reveal that, indeed, the 2015 refugee crisis brought about differences between the European East and the European West in their willingness to admit more immigrants from poor countries outside the continent. We frame those differences as a byproduct of two different political cultures stemming from two different types of nationalism, the inclusive, civic patriotism of the West, with its emphasis on individuals gathered around universal values, norms and political institutions, and the exclusive, ethnic nationalism of the East, with its concept of nation built on the blood and soil imagination