The need for strategic communication in migration policymaking is increasingly widely recognised. Whereas until recently there was relatively little academic evidence of what forms of immigration communication are effective, the past few years have seen a large amount of new experimental evidence. This article overviews 68 experimental studies, as well as other relevant studies, categorising their findings into nine common communication strategies. Appealing to common interest rather than self-interest, appealing to conformity rather than diversity, migrant descriptions, appealing to common ground, and appealing to empathy are consistently shown to be effective. Fact-checking of the effects of migration and appealing to emotions are mostly shown to be effective, as is appealing to identity where applicable. By contrast, appealing to diversity is consistently shown to be ineffective, while correcting information about migrant stocks and appeals to self-interest are mostly shown to be ineffective. Overall, this review article supports psychological findings regarding attitudinal formation that emphasise sociotropic considerations of the effects of immigration, economic or otherwise, on the collective while offering weaker support for egocentric approaches.

Contemporary global crises and transformations—including climate change, migration, digitalization, pandemics, financial and economic integration, and terrorism—increasingly determine democratic politics and policymaking. We examine how populist attitudes are associated with perceptions of the threats posed by these six global crises and transformations. Using original survey data in India and the United Kingdom alongside secondary data in the United Kingdom, we robustly show that stronger populist attitudes are positively associated with the perception of threat posed by all six crises and transformations—particularly to the economy and national way of life, but also, of theoretical note, to humanitarian concerns. Furthermore, experimentally priming populist individuals on global governance solutions to each transformation has no effect on their perception of threat, suggesting that such threat perceptions are not driven by political concerns but by the societal crises and transformations themselves. Overall, our findings theoretically support the ideational conceptualization of populism as a thin ideology, distinct from nationalism or left-right attitudes, which acts as a broad, if thin, political psychological predisposition. Substantially, we cautiously argue that our findings may give cause for optimism about the potential to rally popular support for global governance solutions to global challenges. 

Why do individuals vary in their desire to emigrate? Why are some willing to emigrate irregularly? This article tests four theoretical approaches—socio-demographics; economic and political context; access to migrant networks; and psychological factors—across the Middle East and North Africa region. Data from the Arab Barometer is used to show that the most prevalent factors are youth, university education, being male, and stress levels as well as negative economic and political perceptions, being unmarried, trust in social media, remittances, and low religiosity. Notably, economic factors such as unemployment and income are shown to rarely have an effect. The determinants of being willing to emigrate without papers are fewer and distinct: gender and lower income especially as well as lower education and negative economic and political perceptions. Several contributions to our understanding of emigration are made: a two-step model of irregular emigration based on findings across 12 countries, new evidence of the complex and, within-country, muted role of economic factors, the centrality of psychology, and how, tentatively, it appears that both extreme wealth and war interact with the most fundamental socio-demographic drivers.

This article asks how policy responses to migration in Italy have been shaped both by issue salience and by changing configurations on the centre right of Italian party politics both prior to and following the 2015 'migration crisis'. We show that, first, the increased politicisation of 'irregular' arrivals into Italy after 2015 changed migration from a relatively 'quiet' policy issue to one of 'loud' politics meaning that it was highly salient to the public. This salience significantly advantaged the Lega, who by this point had already transformed into an archetypal, European populist radical right party, but could now campaign successfully nationally and dominate the nominal 'centre-right' coalition. Second, the imposition when in government between June 2018 and September 2019 by the Lega of policies for migrants and asylum-seekers that focussed solely on prevention and removal and ended what remained of prior policy drift. We show that both trends conform to theoretical expectations regarding the relative power of interest groups and public opinion over public policy that are contingent on public issue salience, which we show to be the most plausible determinant of variation in migration policy, rather than public attitudes or party positions, during the period.

Spain and Portugal have long been considered exceptions when it comes to the electoral success of radical right-wing parties in Europe. This scenario changed for both countries in 2019, with the extraordinary rise of Vox in Spain and the comparatively more modest election of one representative of Chega in Portugal. Their emergence – and the stark difference in the extents of their success – provides researchers with an ideal ‘edge-case’ and can be explained via a theoretical model that builds on and fuses previous explanatory models for radical right success. The Iberian cases demonstrate that radical right parties succeed when they (i) avoid the stigma of extremism, (ii) benefit from a gap in political supply on the right and (iii) cater to an unsatiated demand of voters on a salient sociocultural issue. While both countries had long been home to marginal far-right political forces, the stigma of extremism prevented them from being considered credible political alternatives. The appearance of new parties that emerged as a result of splits from the mainstream centre-right, in both cases reflecting a beleaguered political supply, gave the radical right an opportunity to avoid stigma, as we demonstrate through a news content analysis. However, whereas in Spain Vox could profit from both the Catalan independence challenge and the uptick in salience of immigration, which had previously been anomalously low in Iberia, Chega has not (yet) benefited from a similarly ripe political opportunity structure in Portugal.

This article uses new survey evidence from Tunisia, conducted shortly after the three first elections following the Arab Spring, to explain dynamics in electoral behaviour. We find that the strongest and most consistent predictors of vote choice were gender, religiosity and attitudes to the role of Islam in public life. Economic attitudes, other socio-demographics and clientelistic motivations were consistently less or not important factors. These findings support the notion of a paramount Islamist-Secular divide, which is distinct from the Western Left-Right divide, in the Arab World. We also find evidence that Tunisian voters underwent a learning process over the course of elections. Overall, we present evidence to suggest that the primacy of the Islamist-secular axis of political conflict is, in accordance with the evidence from other early divides in transitional democracies, elite-driven, and so is likely to decline in importance over time.

In recent years, there has been greater scholarly enquiry into explaining variation in support for European Union membership. We theorise that one cause of such variation is likely to be non-political psychological predispositions, such as one's personal values. We test this proposition by applying Schwartz's theory of basic human values to predict voting intentions in hypothetical referendums on EU membership. We theorise that these values determine both voting intentions and more proximate explanatory variables of support for EU membership: attitudes to immigration and identifying as European. Using data on 13 countries from the European Social Survey (N=24,703 citizens) and multigroup structural equation modeling, we demonstrate that this psychological framework effectively predicts voting intentions, notably in terms of the consistent cross-country evidence for indirect effects of values on support for membership via European identity and attitudes to immigration. We then discuss the implications of our findings, including differences in effects between countries.

This article looks globally at the motivations behind attitudes to immigration. Such motivations have been typically conceptualised by academics either in terms of the ‘economic competition’ or ‘cultural threat’ that immigrants are perceived to pose to the individual or their ‘in-group’. We propose and test a third possibility: that support for or opposition to immigration is determined by one's perceptions of immigration's effects on social conflict. Using the 2017–2020 World Values Survey (WVS) for forty-nine countries, we show that: in most countries, globally, citizens are more likely to agree than disagree that immigration leads to social conflict; levels of concern about the effects of immigration on social conflict are higher than those regarding unemployment or culture in sixteen—disproportionately economically developed—countries; concern about social conflict is conceptually and distributionally distinct; belief that immigration leads to social conflict predicts immigration policy preferences; but, uniquely, is positively predicted by higher education. Our findings highlight the importance of institutional conflict resolution capacity, including those related to integration, for the politics of migration. 

We consider the role of values as determinants of voting in the UK's 2016 EU referendum. First, we consider and clarify 'values' conceptually, before proceeding to utilise Schwartz's basic human values as the most appropriate. Second, we theorise how these basic human values determine both voting in the referendum as well as three of the most consistently demonstrated determinants of voting in that referendum: attitudes to immigration, identifying as European and trust in politicians. Finally, we demonstrate that this psychological theoretical framework effectively predicts voting behaviour in the referendum using multigmup structural equation modelling. Overall, we show that voting dynamics in the referendum are likely to reflect deeper, more personal psychological predispositions than those captured by existing explanations. In doing so, we make an original contribution to the literature on political psychology related to Brexit, Eumscepticism, political attitudes and electoral behaviour.

This contribution considers how niche parties react when they lose their niche, using the cases of three parties in the turbulent period prior to the 2019 UK general election: the Brexit Party, the Green Party and Change UK. I overview the background of these parties before showing that each lost its respective policy niches to larger, more established parties. I show that each responded with some combination of directly competing with the mainstream party; electorally cooperating with them or other parties; or diversifying into something distinct from their mainstream analogue. I explain how each party’s approach partially explains their 2019 general election result, as well as European Parliament elections result, using British Election Study data. I suggest that this ‘compete, cooperate or diversify’ approach provides a theoretical framework for understanding how niche parties are likely to react to losing their niche elsewhere.