What’s Islam got to do with it? Attitudes toward specific religious and national out-groups, and support for EU policies

Rachid Azrout and Magdalena E Wojcieszak

European Union Politics, 2017, vol. 18, issue 1, 51-72

Abstract: Previous studies predicted European Union attitudes using anti-immigrant attitudes, but without explicitly accounting for attitudes toward different out-groups. We propose that group-specific attitudes independently predict attitudes toward the European Union, but only when the out-group is linked to the European Union issue in question. We additionally argue that realistic or symbolic threat associated with specific out-groups determines whether utilitarian or identity considerations are more important in predicting European Union attitudes. Using a nationally representative Dutch sample ( N  = 2347), we focus on attitudes toward Polish and Muslim immigrants to predict strengthening of European Union integration and Turkey’s potential accession and find support for our hypotheses. The findings indicate the need to rethink the relationship between out-group perceptions and European Union attitudes.

Keywords: Public opinion; European Union integration; European Union enlargement; anti-immigrant attitudes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1465116516678080 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:eeupol:v:18:y:2017:i:1:p:51-72

DOI: 10.1177/1465116516678080

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Union Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().