European identities and migration preferences

Identity matters for explaining attitudes towards the EU, also in the case of migration policy. But how? Most of the existing literature builds on a binary conceptualization of identity, which essentially distinguishes between EU citizens that have integrated some sort of a (not specified) form of a European identity – in contrast to those who have exclusively national or regional identities. Not surprisingly, empirical studies then show that exclusive national identities correlate with preferences for more restrictive migration policies. A shortcoming of this set-up is that the analytical link between identity and migration policy preference is rather loose, as the correlation between the two may only reflect that they correspond to a common latent dimension, and it ignores the multidimensionality of both identity and migration policy. We propose a more nuanced framework of identity which (a) distinguishes between a civic and ethnic conception and (b) varies in how citizens evaluate their own in-group vis-à-vis the out-group. In a second step of our research project, we aim to relate this conceptualization of identity to EU migration policy preferences (including several policy dimensions both on the level of free movement in the single market and of migration from outside the EU). As an extension, we also plan to develop survey experiments for the empirical study of the links between our identity conceptualization and migration policy preferences