The Effects of Cross-Cutting Exposure on Populist and Anti-Immigrant Attitudes

In recent years, public opinion in Austria and beyond has become increasingly polarized with a large number of citizens holding starkly divided opinions on key issues like immigration and welfare inequality. In addition, many citizens show growing discontent towards mainstream politics. In line with these developments, there has been a growing scholarly concern of increasing penetration and proliferation of (far-right) populist discourse among ordinary citizens in their everyday discussions. This study investigates whether and how “cross-cutting” exposure, or exposure to dissimilar political viewpoint, is related to populist and anti-immigrant attitudes. While a great amount of attention is now devoted to the study of the determinants of both anti-immigrant and populist attitudes among the public (e.g., Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2014), the question of whether and how everyday political conversation affects these attitudes remains largely unexplored. Albeit political discussion among individuals is considered by many to be one of the most influential sources of political attitudes (Mutz 1999, 2006; Gastil & Dillard, 1999; Pattie & Johnston, 2009; Eveland & Hively, 2009), existing studies have almost completely overlooked the impact that the immediate social relationships have on populist and anti-immigrant attitudes. Against current developments in the polarization of public opinion, this study aims to assess the impact of cross-cutting exposure on populist and anti-immigrant attitudes and probes whether this impact depends on political dissimilarity of discussion network ties as well as on citizens’ willingness to engage in political discussion. Since encountering dissimilar opinions would encourage people to take others’ views into account (Mutz, 2002; Mutz & Mondak, 2006), exposure to oppositional views should then moderate populist and anti-immigrant attitudes, if not such exposure creates attitudinal ambivalence (Levitan & Visser, 2009; Visser & Mirabile, 2004). Moreover, the influence of political discussion is closely linked to an individual’s propensity to engage in discussion during, and in response to, political disagreement (Kim, Scheufele, & Han, 2011). This study makes at least three important contributions. First, it represents one of the first attempts to investigate the effect of informal social networks on populist and anti-immigrant attitudes. Second, it advances our knowledge of social interactions by investigating simultaneously and in line with state-of-the-art developments in this field of research, t main aspects of social networks, namely the frequency and homogeneity of social interactions as well as the willingness to engage in political discussion. Third, this study represents one of the first attempts to study the pervasiveness of social interactions and political discussion outside the US context in European democracies. Specifically, we investigate the Austrian context, is an ideal case to investigate given that the Austrian electorate is increasingly polarized over immigration and welfare inequality, while populist attitudes appear to be rising, as evidenced by the recent national elections. As such, this proposal lies at the epicentre of current academic and public debates in Europe and beyond.