Thanks, But No Thanks: Attitudes On Refugee Policy in the European Union

IPE colloquium

University of Groningen

15 June 2022

Dawid Walentek

University of Warsaw

About us

• Natalia Letki Principal Investigator (University of Warsaw)
• Ulf Liebe (University of Warwick)
• Peter Thisted Dinesen (University College London)
• Artem Graban (University of Warsaw)
• Dawid Walentek (University of Warsaw)
   
• Funding: NCN (National Science Centre Poland) grant no 2019/33/B/HS6/00841
   
• Our website is here

Background

• 2015 Refugee Crisis
• Budapest's, Prague's and Warsaw's refusal to join the relocation scheme
• Refugee policy in the EU is a patchwork
• Ongoing relevance

Literature

• Preferred refugee profiles and sentiments towards out-group members  (e.g. Adida, Lo, and Platas 2019)
• Effects of exposure on acceptance of out-group members (e.g. Schaub, Gereke, and Baldassarri 2020)
• Behavioural and attitudinal changes in relation to out-group members (e.g. Alesina, Miano, and Stancheva 2018)
   
• Limited research on refugee policy:
  • ​Only interested in allocation (Bansak, Hainmueller, and Hangartner 2017)
  • Asks about policy solutions the EU cannot deliver  (Jeannet, Heidland, Ruhs 2021)

Our project

• Set out to identify what refugee policy Europeans want
• We study attitudes in respect to:
  • allocational regime
  • level of border control
  • right to work
  • freedom of movement
  • cost of the policy
• We test the overlap between attitudes and behaviours

Data & Methods

Data

• Online survey experiment in early 2022
• 10 Member States
• 16,976 respondents
• 4 treatment groups
• 3 components
  • conjoint
  • real-effort
  • questionnaire
• Follow up study (DE, PL & HU) in spring 2022
• Preregistration with EGAP

Treatments

• Three visual primes
  • Welfare
  • Security
  • Humanitarian
• Images accompanied by a short caption
• Widely circulated in media in relation to the relevant primes
• Text-based Status Quo prime on current refugee policy

Methods: Conjoint

• Full randomisation
• Five attributes over twelve levels resulting in 72 policy profiles
• Respondents make six choices over a pair of profiles
• Over 101,856 (force)choices made and 203,712 profile ratings assigned
• Each profile appears on average 2829 times

Methods: Real effort

• Final part of the survey
• Respondents receive first general information about the International Rescue Committee
• Then respondents are presented with the real-effort task, where they must decide whether to donate half of the survey remuneration to the IRC

Results

Conjoint: control

• No meaningful role of the allocation regime
• Preference for increased border control
• Preference for limited freedom of movement
• Preference for the right to work (and dislike of the alternative)
• Dislike of the pricey policy and preference for the low costs

Conjoint: control

• Strong variation between countries in respect to the allocation regimes
  • DE, ES, AU & DEN dislike the Status Quo while HU & SL prefer it
  • DE, ES, AU & PT support relocation while HU opposes
  • All indifferent on fiscal solidarity bar supportive DEN & negative PT
  • Note: DE, ES & AU receive the most and HU the least asylum applications
• Hardly any meaningful variation between the Member States in respect to other attributes than allocation regimes

Real effort

• Control group:
  • PL, DE & BG ~ 25%
  • HU & SL ~ 30%
  • AU & HR ~ 35%
• Treatments:
  • Humanitarian only
  • ATE = .05
    5% higher donation
  • Bonferroni
    correction
  • Region FE (NUTS 2)

Real effort: heterogeneity

• Meaningful heterogeneity in the treatment effect for different levels of ethnocentrism
• Treatment effect does not set-in any more for higher levels of ethnocentrism
• Ethnocentrism based on a set of survey questions

Real effort: attitudes and behaviours

• We see a correspondence between attitudes and behaviours
• Average rating assigned to profiles with a relocation attribute level

Follow up

• Three countries in April & May
  • Germany, Poland and Hungary
• Two samples
  • recontact with January & February round (problematic)
  • fresh sample
• Motivated by the onset of the war in Ukraine

Follow up: MM

• Consistent preferences & ratings of profiles
• Stronger sentiments about refugees joining the labour market
• Change in attitudes towards freedom of movement

Follow up: Effort

• Lower level of donation
• Greater effect size in the recontact group

Conjoint: treatments

• Still in the process
• Sorry!

Discussion

What do we learn?

• Smart Solidarity may turn out to be a disappointment, while dissatisfaction in DE, ES & AU may grow
• Welcoming on the labour market, but not on the streets
• Concerned about costs and borders
   
• Responsive to humanitarian media frame, but not across the (ethnocentric) board
• Attitudes and behaviours do seem to overlap
   
• Preferences stable, despite the war in Ukraine
• Status Quo bias on movement & right to work
• Crowding out effect on donations  

How to proceed?

• What is the core message
• How to organise it
• Which community to target
• And how to reach beyond academia

Thank you