The Journal of European Social Policy just accepted the manuscript “Immigration and Redistribution Revisited: How Different Motivations Can Offset Each Other” (co-authored with Robert Klemmensen). Here is the abstract:
Despite compelling theoretical arguments, existing research has so far failed to provide conclusive empirical evidence on the relationship between preferences for redistribution and attitudes towards immigration. We argue that social scientists risk making erroneous inferences if the causal link connecting an independent variable to a given output is not carefully modelled. This is particularly true in the presence of multiple and partly offsetting intervening variables. We argue that there are at least four motivations linking attitudes towards redistribution and preferred levels of immigration. We observe a statistically significant association between attitudes towards redistribution and preferred levels of immigration, but only after the motivations have been explicitly integrated into the empirical analysis. If the motivations are not explicitly modelled, no systematic relationship between attitudes towards redistribution and preferred levels of immigration can be observed.
Patrick Emmenegger 