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Young men often make up a large share of newly arriving immigrant
populations. How this impacts attitudes is unclear: young men have
the potential to make substantial economic contributions, meaning
attitudes toward them may be more favorable. However, young men may
be seen as security and cultural threats, exacerbating
anti-immigrant attitudes. I conduct a conjoint experiment on a
sample of 2,100 Germans, asking them to evaluate groups of
immigrants with randomly varying shares of young men. The results
show that groups of immigrants with a large share of young men
receive substantially less support. Further tests reveal that
respondents also perceive of these groups as likely to pose security
and cultural threats; there is no evidence that young men are viewed
as having high economic potential. These results have implications
for the importance of economic, cultural, and security concerns in
underpinning attitudes toward immigrants.

AbstractPoliticians frequently use political speech to foster hostility toward immigrants, a strategy that shapes political preferences and behavior and feeds the success of the populist right. Whether political speech can be used to foster tolerance of immigrants, however, remains unexplored. We identify three mechanisms by which political speech could increase tolerance: (1) stressing in-group conceptions that highlight commonalities with immigrants; (2) emphasizing inclusiveness as an in-group norm; and (3) providing information that counters anti-immigrant stereotypes. Using quotes from US politicians in two survey experiments, we find that pro-immigrant speech that stresses inclusive norms or counters negative stereotypes about immigrants leads to more tolerant attitudes (but not behavior) toward immigrants. These effects are small and detectable only in large samples.

We provide evidence that citizenship catalyzes the long-term economic integration of immigrants. Despite the relevance of citizenship policy to immigrant integration, we lack a reliable understanding of the economic consequences of acquiring citizenship. To overcome nonrandom selection into naturalization, we exploit the quasi-random assignment of citizenship in Swiss municipalities that held referendums to decide the outcome of individual naturalization applications. Our data combine individual-level referendum results with detailed social security records from the Swiss authorities. This approach allows us to compare the long-term earnings of otherwise similar immigrants who barely won or lost their referendum. We find that winning Swiss citizenship in the referendum increased annual earnings by an average of approximately 5000 U.S. dollars over the subsequent 15 years. This effect is concentrated among more marginalized immigrants.

Research shows that sexist attitudes are deeply ingrained, with adverse consequences in the socioeconomic and political sphere. We argue that parental leave for fathers—a policy reform that disrupts traditional gender roles and promotes less stereotypical ones—has the power to decrease attitudinal gender bias. Contrasting the attitudes of new parents who were (and were not) directly affected by a real-world policy reform that tripled the amount of fathers' leave, we provide causal evidence that the reform increased gender-egalitarian views in the socioeconomic and political domains among mothers and fathers, and raised support for pro-female policies that potentially displace men among mothers. In contrast, informational, indirect exposure to the reform among the general public produced no attitudinal change. These results show that direct exposure to progressive social policy can weaken sexist attitudes, providing governments with a practical and effective tool to reduce harmful biases.

The economic dimension has typically been considered the primary dimension of political party competition. However, parties often rally voters on the basis of non-economic issues. In this article, we argue that integration into global markets and into the European Union (EU) constrains parties' abilities to credibly differentiate themselves on economic issues. Given these constraints, and voters' awareness of them, parties activate other non-economic issues along which to compete. Using data across 49 countries between 1961 and 2010, this study shows that increased economic integration is associated with increased emphasis on non-economic issues during election campaigns. This effect persists over time and remains robust to a number of alternative explanations and modeling strategies. We also explore the proposed causal mechanisms and show that integration is indeed associated with convergence of party positions on economic issues and that all types of parties—not just new and niche parties—respond to integration by politicizing non-economic issues. Finally, we leverage the latest round of EU enlargement to causally identify the effect of integration on party strategies.