Intergenerational Transmission of Attitudes towards Immigrants across 12 Countries

Leo Azzollini , University of Oxford - Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science
Daniela Bellani, Scuola Normale Superiore
Giulia Rivellini, Università Cattolica, Milan

Do parental attitudes towards immigrants affect those of their children? While migration is a crucial phenomenon in demography and a crucial dimension for politics, there is scarce evidence on the intergenerational transmission of attitudes towards migrants. This contrasts with the considerable role that parental attitudes play in political socialisation research. In this paper, we rely on a political demography lens and formulate competing hypotheses by integrating streams of research on social learning and cohort socialisation, positing respectively that parental attitudes play (do not play) a key role in shaping those of their children. We test these hypotheses relying on Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) data from 2018 for 12 countries, which provide dyadic data on attitudes for both 15 year-olds and their parents. As a dependent variable, we rely on whether the offspring agree that ‘immigrants should have the opportunity to vote’, with the focal covariate being the answer of the parents to the same question. We fit to this data logistic regression models with socio-demographic characteristics, school controls, and country Fixed Effects. The substance of our findings is that the agreement between parents and children tends to be high. The logistic regression results highlight that parental attitudes do play a significant but not majoritarian role in shaping children’s attitudes towards migrants. This is consistently significant across countries, albeit with different magnitudes. Our next steps will focus on further exploring socialization from the gender angle and to explain the cross-national heterogeneity in effect sizes.

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 Presented in Session 25. Migration and Spatial Aspects of Ageing