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