THEORY AND HYPOTHESES

One of the oldest intuitions—it dates from at least Aristotle—is that conflict between groups is rooted in a clash of interests. Group interests can clash over a wide horizon of valued goods, including claims to social status and privileges (Blumer 1958, 4; Bobo and Hutchings 1996, 955). But on most realistic conflict interpretations, the core of group conflict is the clash of competing economic interests (Hardin 1995). In principle the calculus of economic advantage may operate at the individual or collective level, but in the theoretically best-developed interpretation of realistic conflict theory, people identify with a group because they have an individual interest in doing so (Hardin 1995, 48).

Social identity theory is now the principal theoretical alternative to realistic conflict theory (e.g., Brown 1995; Capozza and Brown 2000; and Huddy 2001).¹

Realistic conflict and social identity explanations need not be mutually exclusive. In all likelihood, concerns about both economic well-being and national identity underlie reactions to immigrant minorities in Western Europe, to some discernible extent. But the two theories point in different explanatory directions. Realistic conflict explanations concentrate on social–structural sources of group difference. They take the key explanatory mechanism to be economic competition. And they presume the driving motive is a desire to be materially better off. Social identity explanations concentrate on an array of group memberships. They take the key explanatory mechanism to be group categorization. And they presume the driving motive is a need for positive differentiation. Our understanding of the heart of the conflict over immigrant minorities, and what may be done to ease it, will differ depending how far strains over immigration turn on a conflict of material interests rather than a clash of cultural identities.

The Netherlands is the site of our study. There, but not only there, our hypothesis is that considerations of national identity dominate those of economic interest given current economic and political conditions. Two considerations are key.

First, the bearing of economic concerns on issues of immigrants and immigration is conditional on economic conditions: The worse the economic conditions, the greater the impact of economic concerns; the better the economic conditions, the lesser (Coenders and Scheepers 1998; Quillian 1995). Over the last decade, The Netherlands has been among the best off of the OECD countries, with GDP growing on the one side and government deficits declining on the other (Visser and Hemerijck 1997). Moreover, most Dutch recognize they have become better off and expect to become better off still.²

Second, the impact of concerns about national identity is conditional on the prominence of differences between groups. Specifically, concern over group identity varies as a function of perceptual distinctiveness, salience, and entatitvity.³

But how, exactly, do concerns about either economic well-being or cultural identity influence citizen responses to immigrant minorities and issues of immigration? Consider concerns about economic well-being, for the sake of illustration. They can manifest themselves in two different ways. People may have developed, for whatever reasons, an ongoing concern about their economic prospects that manifests itself in a generalized readiness to be concerned about being economically worse off. On the other hand, some aspect of people's immediate circumstances can trigger a concern about economic well-being. The critical question is, How do predisposing factors and situational triggers in combination shape reactions to ethnic minorities?

From a political point of view, two alternatives stand out.⁵

Gauging the joint impact of predisposing factors and situational triggers requires a combination of randomized experiments and representative public opinion surveys. In this study we report results from a series of three experiments as part of a national survey of the adult population of The Netherlands, carried out from October 1997 through June 1998 by the CATI—Department of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Utrecht University (n=2007). The first, the Decoupling experiment, focuses on predispositions to perceive threats to economic well-being and cultural identity.⁶

THE “DECOUPLING” EXPERIMENT

Our first objective is to gauge the comparative importance of threats to economic well-being and cultural identity in driving negative evaluations of immigrants. A threat to a group's identity and way of life inherently is a collective threat. In contrast, threats to economic interests may be perceived by individuals as threats to their own economic well-being or, alternatively, as threats to the economic well being of their group as a whole. At a more popular level, immigrants have become linked to problems of crime. Threats to safety may be perceived by individuals as threats to their own safety or, alternatively, as threats to the safety of individuals in the society as a whole. Accordingly, we assess three types of threats—to cultural identity, economic well-being, and safety—and assess the last two at two different levels—individual and collective.

But how should perception of a threat be assessed? Here is a representative indicator from the Bobo and Hutchings (1996) Index of Perceived Group Competition: “More good jobs for (group mentioned) means fewer good jobs for members of (other group mentioned).” Notice that the test indicator asks whether an object of value, good jobs in this instance, is at risk and whether a particular group is responsible for it being at risk. The test indicator is thus “double-barreled.” It simultaneously assesses how respondents feel about a possible threat and how they feel about a particular group identified as the source of the threat. But just so far as threat perception indicators tap both a judgment that feelings toward a group and a concern that a object of value is at risk, there is an obvious danger of tautology in explanations of group intolerance. People may see a particular group as threatening and therefore dislike it. But they may also say that it is threatening because they dislike it. And to the extent that the second alternative is right, it means that standard threat perception measures are measuring the very thing, dislike of a group, that they are meant to explain.

Hence the Decoupling experiment. This experiment has two conditions. Consistent with standard practice, the object at risk and the group allegedly putting it at risk are coupled in the first. So one half of the sample, randomly selected, is asked whether they agree strongly, agree somewhat, disagree somewhat, or disagree strongly with a series of five statements.

In the second experimental condition, in contrast, the wording of the question is different in one respect: The reference to ethnic minorities is omitted. So the first question, for example, reads, “I am afraid of increasing violence and vandalism in my neighborhood.”

Just so far as respondents are reacting on the basis of how they feel about the group mentioned (rather than the threat mentioned), threat perception indicators referring to quite different threats should be highly correlated whatever is threatened. Table 1 presents the intercorrelations of threat perception indicators in the coupled condition, above the diagonal, and in the decoupled condition, below the diagonal.

As inspection of Table 1 shows, threat judgments are markedly more correlated with one another—whatever is threatened—in the coupled than in the decoupled condition. Thus the mean correlation between threats in the coupled condition is .49; in the decoupled condition, .29. When threat judgments are coupled with a reference to ethnic minorities, people who perceive themselves to be threatened in one way are markedly more likely to perceive themselves to be threatened in other ways—whatever those other ways are. In short, the double-barreled character of the standard threat perception measurement format blurs the distinctness of different types of threats.

Is there also a danger of tautological explanations of intergroup hostility? We measured hostility toward four ethnic minorities. Respondents are first asked about either Turks or Moroccans, then about either Surinamese or refugees and asylum seekers. Their feelings about each group are assessed using a measure of eight descriptive adjectives, six negative and two positive, validated in a series of previous studies of group hostility.⁷

Table 2 summarizes the impact of different types of threat on hostility toward the four target groups when threat and group source of threat are coupled (first column for each group) and decoupled (second column). For each target group, we report a measure of multicollinearity associated with independent variables, their variance inflation factor (VIF)—in italics —and unstandardized OLS coefficients and their standard errors—in regular font.⁸

In contrast, when reference to what is threatened is decoupled from reference to ethnic minorities as the source of threat, the differential impact of different kinds of threats stands out. Most obviously, perceiving a threat to Dutch culture has by far the largest impact in provoking hostility toward minority groups. That is true for every group—Turks, Moroccans, Surinamese, and refugees and asylum seekers. In contrast, popular discussion of problems of crime notwithstanding,⁹

Some oscillation in the size of coefficients across different target groups should be noted. Both egocentric and sociocentric safety threats are significant predictors for hostility to refugees, but the former is puzzlingly negative in sign, as it also is for Moroccans. Also, sociocentric economic threats are significant for Surinamese and for refugees and asylum seekers but not for Turks or Moroccans. For that matter, Table 2 also shows that economic threats matter less, or not at all, as a source of hostility to Turks and Moroccans but are a significant source of hostility to Surinamese and to refugees and asylum seekers. What might explain these differences between groups?

One possibility follows from a confound of order and religion effects. Respondents were first asked about either Turks or Moroccans, then about either Surinamese or refugees and asylum seekers. Respondents thus always were first asked about a Muslim group, and only then about a non-Muslim one. And because the first group is always Muslim, the (possible) impact of religion is entangled with the (possible) impact of order. Another possibility follows from the price in confidence levels exacted by assignment of subjects to multiple experimental conditions. The experimental variation of threat perception indicators into two forms, coupled and decoupled, cuts the sample size in half. In turn, the randomized assignment to one of a pair of minority groups cuts it in half again. Thus the effect of individual and collective economic threats on hostility to minorities, which is in the expected direction, may not reach conventional standards of statistical significance because of the limited number of observations. How can this pair of measurement problems—the slicing of the sample through assignment to multiple treatment conditions and the potential confounding of religion and question order—be dealt with?

By design our study included a second measure of hostility toward a group, namely, social distance.¹¹

Table 3 replicates the analysis in Table 2, substituting the social distance measure of prejudice for the stereotype measure of prejudice. The results are clear and consistent. Perceived threats to safety, whether to the individual or to the groups as a whole, are not significant for any minority group. Perceived threats to economic well-being at both the personal and the national level are significant predictors of hostility for every minority group. And perceived threat to the Dutch culture is far and away the strongest predictor of hostility to minorities whether or not the minority is Muslim.

To this point, an explanatory account of intolerance toward immigrants centered on concerns about national economic well-being has been tested independently of other explanations of prejudice. To what extent do either of these concerns matter, it is necessary to ask, if the standard factors invoked in analyses of intolerance are taken into account?

In Table 4 the analysis incorporates many of the larger family of sociodemographic and psychological factors established by previous research to be sources of intolerance—authoritarian values,¹³

For all analyses, then, threats to cultural identity cut deeper than considerations of economic interest (once the problem of confounding is dealt with). But perhaps threats to economic interest matter especially for those who are not well off economically. To test this conjecture, both measures of prejudice, stereotype and social distance, were regressed on perceived threats, with perceived economic threat interacted successively with income, occupational status, and perceived economic well-being. Two sets of analyses were conducted. In one the observed values for the income and occupational status were used, ignoring missing data; in the other, the imputed values, to correct for missing analyses. The interaction effects were statistically insignificant in all cases.

There is another and more subtle problem to consider, however. Just because people say that they perceive another group to threaten their cultural identity, it does not follow that they actually fear for their cultural identity. They may say they do to mask their true motives. So they may say that their concern is to protect the well-being of the national culture and way of life when their concern, in truth, is to preserve their own economic well-being.

It is accordingly worth examining the larger matrix of considerations in which threats to culture and economic well-being are embedded. Just so far as the measure of perceived threat to cultural identity measures what it is intended to measure, than it should be tied more closely to other measures of the importance of national identity than to judgments of economic circumstances. Similarly, just so far as perceived threats to economic well-being measure what they are intended to measure, then they should be tied more closely to judgments of economic circumstances and prospects rather to evaluations of the importance of national identity.

We have seen that the differential impact of different types of threat on hostility to ethnic minorities comes more clearly into view in the decoupled than in the coupled condition. A picture of the correlates of threat perception should also come more clearly into focus in the decoupled than in the coupled condition, if the “double-barreled” character of standard threat perception measures is indeed a problem. Table 5 accordingly reports ordered probit regressions of perceived threats to cultural identity and to economic well-being, first in the “coupled” condition, then in the “decoupled” condition.

In the coupled condition, indicators of threat to economic interests, whether personal and national, are entangled with considerations of identity. Conversely, threats to cultural identity are entangled with considerations of economic well-being. In the decoupled condition, in contrast, extraneous considerations tend to be trimmed. For both threats to cultural identity and to personal economic well being, then, there is a sharpening of discriminant validity when threat perception indicators are not double-barreled. We therefore concentrate on the correlates of threat perception in the “decoupled” condition.

Three principal results stand out. The first concerns a common basis for perceptions of threats. In a pioneering study, Marcus et al. (1995) hypothesized that one component of a readiness to perceive a specific threat is a generalized readiness to perceive threats. A generalized readiness to perceive threats and a lack of self-confidence and self-esteem go together (Sniderman 1975). Accordingly, we use an index of self-esteem derived from the California Psychological Inventory,¹⁵

The second finding concerns the distinctness of different types of threats, notwithstanding this point of psychological commonality. To assess importance of national identity to individuals' personal identity, we use an index developed by Luhtanen and Crocker (1992). To canvass people's judgments of economic circumstances, we deploy questions about their personal and the national financial situation, both retrospectively and prospectively. (For question wording of all items, see Appendix.) Once a common reference to ethnic minorities is omitted, a readiness to perceive a threat to the national culture is primarily tied to the Luhtanen–Crocker measure of importance of national identity. Similarly, a readiness to perceive a threat to personal economic well-being is primarily tied to judgments of economic considerations, particularly to judgments that personal economic prospects look bleak over the next two years and that personal financial circumstances have deteriorated.

The third finding has to do with the intermediate position of perceptions of a threat to the national economy. On the one side, they are strongly tied to judgments of economic considerations. But on the other, they are substantially related to the importance of a national identity to a person's sense of personal identity. Perceived threats to the national economy thus have a strong symbolic component. We did not predict this result, but we believe that it makes intuitive sense. Threats to a country's way of life and to a country's economy share a common feature. Each focuses on the society as a whole, on a sense that “we” are vulnerable. And just so far as a perception of threats to the national economy has a whole involves an identification of an individual with the larger society, it is not surprising that the more important a sense of national identification is to individuals' sense of personal identity, the more likely they are to perceive a threat to the economic well-being of the nation. In contrast, the distinctness of threats to self-interest and cultural identity undercut the suggestion that individuals are claiming to perceive a threat to the national way of life to mask their concern about their individual (or national) economic well-being.

THE “FITTING-IN” EXPERIMENT

The results to this point speak to differences between individuals in the threats they perceive to economic well-being and cultural identity. A second and quite different issue also needs to be examined. To what extent does the same individual react differently when threats to cultural identity or economic well-being become salient?

The Dutch study was expressly designed to assess, in parallel, situational and dispositional threats to economic interest and national identity. The Fitting-In experiment accordingly manipulates the salience of threats to economic interests and to national identity by manipulating the characteristics of immigrants. Respondents are randomly assigned to one of four conditions. In the first and second, “a group of new immigrants that may come here” is characterized either as “highly educated and well suited for well-paying jobs” or as “not highly educated or well trained and only suited for unskilled jobs.” In the third and fourth conditions, immigrants are characterized either as people who “speak Dutch fluently and have a very good chance to fit in smoothly with the Dutch culture” or as people who “don't speak Dutch fluently and don't have a good chance to fit in smoothly with the Dutch culture.” All are asked the same test item: “Do you think it is a good idea or bad idea for these immigrants to be allowed to come here?” Four response options are presented: very good idea, somewhat good idea, somewhat bad idea, and extremely bad idea.

Which evokes the stronger reaction—the issue of economic integration or that of cultural integration? Figure 1 reports the distribution of responses as a function of immigrant characteristics. A poor fit either economically or culturally increases opposition to immigration. But whether or not immigrants are likely to fit in culturally matters far more than whether or not they will fit in economically. As Figure 1 shows, four of every five Dutch want to stiffen immigration requirements when immigrants do not speak Dutch fluently and do not have a good chance to fit in smoothly with Dutch culture, compared to two of five when they do. In contrast, two of every three Dutch do so when immigrants are not highly educated and well suited for well-paying jobs, compared to one of two when they are. Moreover, not fitting in culturally evokes significantly more opposition to immigration than not fitting in economically, while fitting in culturally promotes significantly more support for it than fitting in economically.¹⁶

The pivotal question politically, however, is the impact of predisposing factors and situational triggers in combination. Suppose that public attention is drawn to the question of cultural conflict between established norms and those of new immigrants, say, by stories in the mass media or in the campaign of a national political figure. The salience of the issue of cultural identity can operate as a situational trigger. If the effect of this trigger is only (or primarily) to activate those already predisposed to respond negatively to immigrants, it will not alter the fundamental political landscape. But just so far as the effect of this situational trigger is to increase opposition from those not already predisposed to respond negatively to immigrants, the result is to enlarge the constituency throughout the society backing exclusionary reactions to immigrants.

Table 6 assesses the specific way in which opposition to immigration is conditional both on a predisposition to perceive threats to cultural identity and economic interest and on the salience of threats to economic interests or cultural identity. Consider first the interplay of predisposing factors and situational triggers with respect to cultural identity. Column (1) in Table 6 presents an ordered probit regression of opposition to immigration on perceived cultural threat, the experimental treatment triggering the issue of cultural integration, and the interaction of the two. If triggering a concern about cultural integration has a galvanizing effect, then respondents more concerned about a threat to the national culture should be disproportionately more opposed to immigration of those who will have difficulty fitting in culturally, generating a significant interaction between cultural threat and experimental condition. In contrast, if triggering a concern about a cultural integration has a mobilizing effect, it should evoke proportionately as strong a reaction across-the-board. Table 6 shows that perceived threat increases opposition to immigration; so, too, does experimental triggering of the problem of cultural identity; but there is no interaction between them. In short, the results point to a mobilizing rather than a galvanizing effect.

The robustness of this result can be tested. Equivalent analyses of the joint effect of a disposition to perceive economic threats and a situational trigger of economic threats are provided for both individual economic well-being (column [2] in Table 6) and national economic well-being (column [3] in Table 6). The results parallel those for cultural identity. Triggering either type of economic concern evokes proportionately as strong a reaction from those who ordinarily are not at all concerned about them as from those who are most concerned about them. In short, the impact of situational triggers is neither confined to nor concentrated among the ranks of those expressly concerned about a threat to cultural identity. On the contrary, there consistently is an across-the-board mobilizing reaction.

THE “IDENTITY PRIMING” EXPERIMENT

The Fitting-In experiment turns on direct reference to characteristics of immigrants, desirable in one condition, frankly undesirable in the other. But of course there are constraints against direct public references to undesirable characteristics of immigrant minorities. Political aspirants who call attention to the problems of cultural or economic integration risk being labeled racist. They may do so anyway; indeed, have done so anyway. All the same, it is important to ask, Can opposition to immigration be mobilized in a way that is unambiguously legitimate?

In the Identity Priming experiment, respondents are randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions. In one their identity as Dutch citizens is primed; in the other, their identity as individuals. In the national identification condition, the question begins with the introduction: “People belong to different types of groups. One of the most important and essential of these groups is the nation which you belong to. In your case, you belong to the Dutch nationality. Each nation is different.” In the personal identification condition, the question begins with the introduction: “People differ in many ways and each human being is unique. One person likes music, another likes to go for a walk, still another likes to go out. Everyone is different.” After the priming introduction, all respondents are asked, “Do you [as a Dutch person/personally] think that allowing new immigrants to enter The Netherlands should be made more difficult than it is now?” Responses take the form of a modified Likert scale, ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

The crucial question for the politics of immigration is whether bringing people's sense of national (rather than personal) identity to the fore enlarges the constituency opposed to immigration above and beyond those already predisposed to oppose it out of a concern that the national way of life is threatened. Figure 2 therefore reports attitudes toward immigration conditional both on the type of prime (national or personal) and on the extent of perceived threat to the Dutch way of life.¹⁷

It is natural to suppose that identity politics matters for those for whom considerations of national identity matter—that is, matter consciously. And they do for a large number. In our study, on the order of one in every four strongly agree that the Dutch way of life is under threat; and support for making immigration more difficult is very nearly universal among them in both experimental conditions, as Figure 2 shows. There is thus a ceiling effect on the experimental treatment at one end of the continuum of concern about cultural threats. The striking aspect of the identity priming experiment results accordingly lies at the other end of the continuum. Here are respondents who are ordinarily not concerned at all about a threat to the Dutch way of life. But when they are primed to think in terms of their national rather than their personal identity, opposition to immigration increases significantly—significantly substantively, not just statistically. Among the third of the sample that reports the lowest cultural threat, 45% agree that immigration should be made more difficult in the personal prime condition, compared to 69% in the national prime condition. The findings of the Identity Priming experiment thus fit those of the Fitting-In experiment. Both show that situational triggers mobilize opposition broadly through the general public rather than just activating a core constituency already predisposed to oppose immigration.