The Differing Effects of Personal Values on Attitudes towards Migrants in East and West Europe

There has been plenty of research linking personal values to political attitudes, including attitudes towards migrants (e.g. Davidov & Meulemann, 2012; Schwartz et al., 2014; Goren et al., 2016). Typically, values of universalism and self-transcendence have been found to be most relevant to pro-migrant attitudes, whilst conservation values (e.g. conformity and tradition) are related to anti-migrant attitudes. However, Davidov et al. (2014) reported that these effects were weaker in Eastern European countries than those in the West, and argued that, in general, the effects of personal values on political attitudes are weaker in countries with higher levels of cultural embeddedness (i.e. where individuals are expected to strive towards shared goals). In this study, using data from the latest round of the European Social Survey, however, I demonstrate that one set of values is more important in Eastern European countries than in Western European ones – self-direction. Using multi-level modelling to predict willingness to allow migrants into the country, this study found an interaction term between a region (post-communist vs. other) and self-direction to be strongly significant. According to this model the within country effect of self-direction on attitudes towards migrants is over 60% higher in post-communist countries than other European countries. This finding is corroborated using split-group structural equation modelling, whereby a model allowing the effects of values on attitudes towards migrants to vary between the two regions had significantly better fit than a model that did not allow differentiation. In both the multi-level model and the structural equation model, the independent effect of self-direction on attitudes towards migrants was only marginally significant in Western European countries (p<0.05) but was strongly significant in Easter European ones. (p<0.001). The fact that one set of values plays a greater role in predicting political attitudes in Eastern Europe presents a challenge to the cultural embeddedness hypothesis proposed by Davidov et al. (2014), which suggests that all personal values should be less important in such countries. This study explores alternative explanations for why the effect size of self-direction is consistently higher in those counties, including economic development, pre-existing migration levels and the broader value structure of the countries. These findings are relevant to campaigns to tackle xenophobia in both post-communist and non-post-communist countries.