Need for support or economic competition? A survey experiment measuring implicit attitudes towards immigrants

The so-called migration crisis in Europe potentially alters the political structures across countries. However, it is unclear what citizens actually associate with the immigrants. News media reports seems to emphasise two groups of citizens: those who welcome and support the immigrants, on the one hand, and skeptics who perceive the immigrants as competitors regarding jobs, welfare, and scarce resources, on the other. Our research attempts to empirically verify these groups and to identify their common characteristics. As attitudinal measures about immigrants can be biased by social desirability pressures (e.g., Knoll, 2013; Khan & Ecklund, 2012; Janus, 2010; Ostapczuk et al., 2009; Krumpal, 2012; Velasco González et al., 2008), we measure attitudes towards immigrants implicitly using and Implicit Associations Test (e.g., Karpinski & Steinman, 2006: Greenwald et al., 1998). Implicit attitudes are based on affective, spontaneous evaluations and thus circumvent the issue of social desirability bias (e.g., Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006; Ksiazkiewicz & Hedrick, 2013; Gawronski et al., 2015). The analysis relies on a Single Category Implicit Associations Test that has been newly developed to capture whether respondents link immigrants with need or competition. The survey experiment was integrated into an Online Panel Study by the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES).