Change in migrants’ political attitudes: Acculturation and cosmopolitanization

The forthcoming article “Change in migrants’ political attitudes: Acculturation and cosmopolitanization” by Eva Krejcova, Filip Kostelka, and Nicolas Sauger is summarized by the author(s) below.

How does migration shape individuals’ political attitudes? Do migrants retain attitudes acquired in their countries of origin, or adopt those of their new societies? With nearly one in five residents in developed democracies born abroad, the answers carry major implications for democratic politics. Yet, existing evidence remains fragmented and often contradictory. We provide a new theoretical framework, innovative methods, and rich empirical findings that help untangle the complexity of migrants’ political resocialization and reconcile divergent conclusions in earlier studies.

Researchers have long debated whether migrants resist change or acculturate into their host societies. We formalize this debate by constructing a one-dimensional, Euclidean space. The attitudinal distance between sending and receiving countries constitutes a continuum. At one end lies full attitudinal alignment with the country of origin (resistance); at the other, complete adoption of host-country attitudes (acculturation).

Previous studies implicitly assumed that migrants’ attitudes are positioned between those of locals in sending and receiving countries. We argue that certain attitudes may lie beyond this continuum, as they are likely transformed by the migration experience itself. We call them transnational attitudes, distinguishing them from polity-specific attitudes, rooted in national contexts. We hypothesize that migration triggers cosmopolitanization of transnational attitudes and acculturation of polity-specific attitudes: migrants become distinctively supportive on transnational issues, while increasingly resembling locals in their new country on polity-specific issues.

We test our hypotheses using cross-sectional and panel data spanning nearly 380,000 observations from 104 sending and 28 destination countries. We apply our typology to four dimensions of political competition in contemporary Europe: redistribution, homosexuality, European integration, and immigration. Migrants’ embedding in two national contexts—origin and destination—poses challenges for statistical modelling. To address them, we combine the estimated dependent variable method with the logic of counterfactuals. This new approach, applicable to a range of other research problems, allows us to compare migrants with counterfactual locals in both sending and receiving countries.

Our analysis proceeds in three steps. First, we compare migrants’ and locals’ positions on each of the four issues. Next, we use panel data to examine the evolution of migrants’ attitudes over time. Finally, we pioneer an empirical inquiry into self-selection. Leveraging survey data on migration intentions and panel metadata, we assess whether potential differences between migrants and locals precede migration.

Our results reveal the remarkable malleability of migrants’ attitudes. On polity-specific issues—such as redistribution and homosexuality—migrants’ tend to acculturate to the host country over time. But on transnational issues—immigration and European integration—they hold consistently more supportive views than locals. These patterns are not explained by self-selection: potential and future migrants attitudinally resemble stayers before migrating.

Besides the new theoretical and methodological tools, our readers may take away three main empirical insights. First, while migrants’ polity-specific attitudes acculturate, their transnational attitudes do not—bringing more supportive views on immigration and European integration into their host societies. Second, migrants’ attitudinal change provides strong evidence of adult political resocialization. Finally, individuals sometimes combine culturally conservative and cosmopolitan views—reflecting different logics of attitudinal change. Our theory and findings help explain these hybrid attitudinal configurations in contemporary democracies.

About the Author(s): Eva Krejcova is a Junior Lecturer at IDHEAP, University of Lausanne, Filip Kostelka is a Professor of Political Science, Chair in Political and Social Change, and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political and Social Sciences (SPS) at the European University Institute (EUI), and Nicolas Sauger is a University Professor at Sciences Po Paris. Their research “Change in migrants’ political attitudes: Acculturation and cosmopolitanization” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.