Policy Preferences on Immigration and Evaluations of Individual Immigrants. A Cross-National Experiment

The survey experiment is part of a cross national project on Evaluations of Immigrants and Policy Preferences. The Norwegian Survey is funded by the Research Council of Norway and directed by Toril Aalberg. Shanto Iyengar at Stanford University is Principal Investigator and director of a similar US survey, while Ray Duch conducted the survey experiment in the United Kingdom. Stuart Soroka directed a Canadian version while Kees Aarts have been responsible for a Dutch version of this study.

The main purpose of the Norwegian survey experiment was to investigate Norwegians’ attitudes towards individual immigrants and to assess the consistency between policy preferences on the one hand, and willingness to admit individual immigrants on the other. It was equally important to examine whether the same factors that influence policy opinions also affect how people evaluate individual immigrants. Therefore the survey included batteries of questions that had been used in traditional cross-national surveys on immigration. Additionally it was also included questions about specific groups of immigrants and how the respondents evaluated two specific individual immigrants. Following the more traditional survey questions respondents were presented with two vignettes each describing a potential male immigrant. In these vignettes the information that was given about the immigrants’ socio-economic, cultural and ethnical background was manipulated.