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Easing the Heavy Hand: Humanitarian Concern, Empathy, and Opinion on Immigration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 November 2013

Benjamin J. Newman ,
Todd K. Hartman ,
Patrick L. Lown  and
Stanley Feldman
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Abstract

The bulk of the public opinion research on immigration identifies the factors leading to opposition to immigration. In contrast, we focus on a previously unexplored factor yielding support for immigration: humanitarianism. Relying upon secondary analysis of national public opinion survey data and an original survey experiment, we demonstrate that humanitarian concern significantly decreases support for restrictive immigration policy. Results from our survey experiment demonstrate that in an information environment evoking both threat and countervailing humanitarian concern regarding immigration, the latter can and does override the former. Last, our results point to the importance of individual differences in empathy in moderating the effects of both threat and humanitarian inducements.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 583 - 607
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

Newman: Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut; Hartman: Department of Government & Justice Studies, Appalachian State University; Lown and Feldman: Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University (emails [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]). An online appendix with supplementary materials is available at http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0007123413000410.

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