| The intensity of negative orientations toward immigrants and immigration in the post-communist European states is puzzling, as foreigners' presence is less visible than in Western Europe and has yet to become politicized. Thus, the crucial question that arises is: How different are the ex-socialist publics in their representations of immigrants and immigration policies among themselves and, taken together, compared to Western Europe? To answer this, I draw on and extend the existing theoretical and empirical contributions on prejudice and national identity by proposing a model which incorporates both individual and contextual factors. Using data from the 1995 module of International Social Survey Programme and a set of macro-level indicators, I conduct country-based and cross-national multilevel analyses in the two European regions, separate and combined. Education, nativism, chauvinism, regime legitimacy and protectionism are the strongest individual-level predictors in both regions, despite dissimilar patterns of effects. Rightist party affiliation fails to explain attitudinal variation across the nine post-communist countries, but subjective class does. At the macro-level, politico-economic history separates the four Visegrad Group member-states from other transitional countries and the concurrence of unemployment rate and proportional presence of foreigners emerges as a consistent predictor in both regions. Testing for differential effects reveals that micro-level factors have weaker influences in the ex-socialist states than in Western Europe, but the post-communist publics are characterized to higher extent by a long-run self-interest rooted in notions of threat and rational calculations. An inter-regional comparison further suggests that contextual factors play a heightened role in explaining the dispersion of attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policies in the Central and Eastern European countries. |
