Effects of Public Announcements by Political and Social Decision-Makers on Prejudices and Negative Attitudes Towards Refugees: Results from Two Survey Experiments

The number of recognized protection seekers in Germany has almost doubled since 2015. For 2023, German and European authorities expect refugee numbers to additionally rise substantially. In November 2022 and February 2023, the University of Hamburg and the German Institute of Global and Area Studies conducted the first two waves of the representative study "People in Germany: International" (MiDInt). The aim of this study is to analyse the influence of internationally significant political events and political decisions on political attitudes of people in Germany. In each of the two waves, around n=2,500 people were asked about their attitudes toward refugees. Although the majority of people in Germany do not feel that their way of life as well as their cultural and social values are threatened by refugees. More than half of the respondents believe that it is mainly violent criminals who come to Germany as refugees. Almost two-thirds reject faster naturalization of refugees. In the first wave, we conducted a survey experiment to analyse the of publicly reported statements by representatives of civil society or political organizations on the growing influx of refugees on people's attitudes toward refugees. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of six groups. Respondents from five of these groups (splits 1 through 5) were presented with a vignette containing a fictitious news story containing the information that a large increase in refugee movements to Europe is to be expected. This message was additionally supplemented for splits 1-4 with a fictitious statement by representatives of one of the following organizations: employers' associations (split 1), Amnesty International (split 2), representatives of local authorities (split 3), and the right-wing party Alternative for Germany AfD (split 4). While the first two statements welcomed the admission of more refugees with different justifications, the representatives of the third and fourth statements were critical in this regard and expressed their negative evaluation of the increase of the number of refugees with different justifications and reasons for their respective concerns. It was found that the expression of positive comments concerning refugees contributed significantly to a reduction of respondents' negative attitudes towards refugees, while no effects on respondents' attitudes toward refugees could be found negative comments towards refugees. In the second wave, an similar survey experiment was conducted with respect to the effects publicly reported evaluations of the immigration of refugees by different social and political institutions on attitudes towards refugees. The aim of the second experiment was to analyse whether the effects that emanate from positive assessments of the admission of further refugees to Germany communicated publicly by representatives of important social institutions, which was found in our first survey experiment, is depended on the kind of person who expressed the positive evaluation of the admission of refugees (i.e. politicians or representatives of other institution of civil society (e.g. employers' associations)) and how the respondents assessed the competence of this person/institution (high competence/low competence) with respect to implications of immigration for the economy and the social life.