The impact of regionalism on anti-immigrant attitudes: a multilevel international comparative study

Abstract

Regionalism, understood as affective attachment of people to place, is shifting into the focus of social scientific attention. An important aspect of this are the globally observable encounters of growing numbers of immigrants with regional identities. Empirical work concerning the impact of regionalism on anti-immigrant attitudes has been contradictory so far. Results range from a moderate to no influence. The paper, thus, analyses the intricate relationship between hostility towards immigrants and regionalism in detail. Merging country-level data on the extent of regional autonomy in a nation-state with individual and regional data on regionalism enables us to gauge the relevance of regionalism for anti-immigrant attitudes in a comparative perspective. The paper presents a multilevel regression analysis that shows a mitigating relationship of the presence of extensive regional autonomy in a nation-state on anti-immigrant attitudes at the country level. Regionalism, unlike nationalism, does not correlate with anti-immigrant attitudes at the regional or individual level, while nationalism is clearly significant at both levels. These results reflect general global prejudice trends and the call for further work on the effect mechanisms of institutionally granted regional autonomy on openness to immigrants.