This paper shows that cultural and material threats exist side by side, serving different psychological functions, and that they manifest in differential attitudes towards immigrants from different ethnic or racial origins. While culturally threatened individuals prefer immigrants akin to themselves, as opposed to those from different races and cultures, the materially threatened prefer immigrants who are different from themselves who can be expected not to compete for the same resources. We test our hypotheses using multilevel structural equation modelling, based on data from twenty countries in the 2002 wave of the European Social Survey. The disaggregation of these two types of perceived threat reveals responsiveness to the race of immigrants that is otherwise masked by pooling the two threat dimensions.
Belief in God's control of the world is common to many of the world's religions, but there are conflicting predictions regarding its role in shaping attitudes toward the welfare state. While the devout are expected to support pro-social values like helping others, and thus might be supportive of the welfare state, the possibility of taking action is undermined by the belief in God's absolute control over world affairs and in a morally perfect providence, who is responsible for the fates of individuals. As the literature provides mixed results on this question, this study examines the role of belief in God's control on welfare attitudes using three priming experiments and two priming tasks, carried out with a design that is both cross-cultural (US vs. Israel) and cross-religious tradition (Judaism vs. Catholicism). We find evidence that, largely, belief in God's control increases support for income redistribution among Israeli Jews (study 1), American Jews (study 2), and American Catholics (study 3). The findings suggest that the traditional and common political gap between the economic left and the religious, based on the evaluation that religious beliefs lead to conservative economic preferences, may be overstated.
How does the content of public allegations impact regulatory communication strategies? Employing a multinomial logistic regression analysis and an original data set, this article analyzes the Israeli banking regulator's nuanced responses to public expressions of opinion between 1996 and 2012. We demonstrate this agency's greater propensity to acknowledge problems, yet mostly shift blame to others when faced with claims that regulation is overly lenient, and to deny allegations that regulation is excessive. These findings, although based on one institution, are important because they demonstrate an agency's differential response to external allegations, given their content and its assessment of the relative threat to its reputation. They also suggest that external audiences may be able to shape agency attention and response by carefully framing their claims in light of their understandings of agencies' distinct reputational vulnerabilities.
Studies on public opinion about welfare already acknowledge the role context plays in individual attitudes towards welfare. However, the much‐debated effect of socially held values and beliefs on attitudes towards social policy has not been empirically investigated. Drawing on studies in political and social psychology, as well as Shalom Schwartz's work on universal human values, this article argues that social values, specifically egalitarianism and embeddedness, affect individual support for social welfare policies. Moreover, we posit that social values condition the effect that individual ideological orientations have on attitudes towards government responsibility, such that the effect of embeddedness is much stronger for right‐wing and moderate identifiers than those who lean towards the left. We test our hypotheses using data from the European Social Surveys (ESS) and International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Role of Government module and employing multi‐level modelling. Our results provide evidence of the importance of social context and shared values in influencing attitudes towards welfare.
While recent literature reports that network diversity generates tolerance, empirical data suggest that in Israel, a highly diverse country, tolerance has been in scarce supply. The well-documented importance of personal value preferences (specifically, openness to change vs. conservation and self-transcendence vs. self-enhancement) in producing tolerant views leads us to hypothesize that values function as boundary conditions mitigating the impact of network diversity upon both political and social tolerance. Building on a representative survey conducted in Israel in 2011, we show that diversity contributes to tolerance more when people are open-minded; when conservatives encounter dissimilar attitudes, they are either less affected or respond with increased intolerance. Secondly, those who highly regard the opinions of others and express an individual predisposition for self-transcendence at the expense of self-enhancement are affected by network diversity to a greater extent. Further, the effect of diversity on tolerance is mediated by the perceived threat from the relevant group.
Somewhat paradoxically, numerous scholars in various disciplines have found that religion induces negative attitudes towards immigrants, while others find that it fuels feelings of compassion. We offer a framework that accounts for this discrepancy. Using two priming experiments conducted among American Catholics, Turkish Muslims, and Israeli Jews, we disentangle the role of religious social identity and religious belief, and differentiate among types of immigrants based on their ethnic and religious similarity to, or difference from, members of the host society. We find that religious social identity increases opposition to immigrants who are dissimilar to in-group members in religion or ethnicity, while religious belief engenders welcoming attitudes toward immigrants of the same religion and ethnicity, particularly among the less conservative devout. These results suggest that different elements of the religious experience exert distinct and even contrasting effects on immigration attitudes, manifested in both the citizenry's considerations of beliefs and identity and its sensitivity to cues regarding the religion of the target group.