European Attitudes towards the Management of Ethnic Diversity. Concepts, Dimensions and Individual Factors

Although the management of ethnic diversity in West European societies gave rise to many academic researches, few studies dealt with public attitudes on that crucial political issue. We address this lacuna by attempting to conceptualize, measure, and explain European attitudes towards the management of ethnic diversity. From a theoretical point of view, it is first argued that issues related to individual equality should be crucially distinguished from issues related to cultural difference. Using unpublished data from the Group Focus Enmity European survey (N=1109), we then ask whether public attitudes reflect this fundamental distinction. These attitudes are expected to break into separate dimensions (H1); show a proper, significant effect on public preferences towards concrete integration policies (H2); and differ in their individual, explanatory variables (H3). Results (factor and regression analyses) confirm these expectations. Notably, we show that only the Cultural Difference dimension is significantly affected by the Perception of Islam and Cultural Threat