Who misperceives the foreign-born share in Europe? A machine-learning approach

Kevin Denny

No 202609, Working Papers from School of Economics, University College Dublin

Abstract: Citizens of developed democracies systematically overestimate the size of their foreign-born population. A now substantial comparative literature has converged on a familiar set of correlates: education, ideology, media exposure, inter-group contact and country-level actual immigrant share. Almost without exception, this literature has used multilevel OLS or logistic regression on a pre-specified set of covariates, with little discipline over which marginal predictors enter the model. I apply Lasso-based variable selection, including post-double selection inference for a set of focal predictors, to a rich candidate set of 35 individual-level variables drawn from a large European cross-national survey. Of these, 26 are robustly selected. The canonical predictors survive, but the analysis also highlights three results that have been under-emphasised in prior work: depressive symptoms are a robust correlate of overestimation; social trust rivals education as a calibrating influence; and general television consumption, not political news viewing, accounts for the measured media effect.

Keywords: Immigration attitudes; Misperception; Innumeracy; Machine learning; Lasso (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C55 D83 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2026-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10197/32467 First version, 2026 (application/pdf)

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:ucn:wpaper:202609

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from School of Economics, University College Dublin Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by UCD School of Economics ().