How Attitudes towards Refugees Are Shaped by the Sex Ratio of Inflows: Evidence from an Online Survey Experiment

Chia-Jung Tsai , Max-Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Robert Gordon Rinderknecht, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
John Palmer, Pompeu Fabra University
Emilio Zagheni, Max Planck Institute for demographic Research

This study investigates the extent to which the sex ratio of refugee populations can shape attitudes toward these populations in Germany. Recent empirical work by Dancygier et al. (2022) links anti-immigrant hate crimes in Germany with mate competition in areas where refugee populations' sex ratios are skewed toward men. We build on this work by using a vignette survey experiment to explore the relationship between native attitudes and varying refugee sex ratios in Germany. We investigate whether the sex ratio of the refugee population contributed to the differences in people's non-acceptance toward the refugee influx and perceptions of different types of threats—threats to job competition, mate competition, German culture, and safety. We sample respondents through Facebook Advertising Manager in the German state Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania. Our result shows that non-acceptance toward a refugee group increases in line with the increase in the sex ratio of this group. Besides, perceived threats toward German culture and safety are especially marked by the extreme sex ratio of non-white male refugees. Female respondents tend to show more tolerant attitudes to groups of less male refugees than male respondents. However, female respondents also perceived higher threats in culture and mate competition from non-white male refugees. Male respondents perceived higher threats in job competition from non-white male refugees. Both female and male respondents perceived higher threats to safety from non-white male refugees. This study aims to clarify the mechanism of occurrence of the negative attitudes toward refugee influx in Germany.

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 Presented in Session 116. Refugee Realities and Resettlement Reflections