ABSTRACT

This chapter examines attitudes of the ethnic majority population towards two distinctive types of ethnic outgroups: immigrants in general and political refugees in particular. Ethnic competition theory and localism theory focus on two distinctive motives why some members of the ethnic majority population, who find themselves in specific individual and contextual conditions, show more ethnic exclusionist reactions than others. Adding the mediating variables perceived ethnic threat and localistic orientation to the models substantially improved the model's goodness-of-fit explaining resistance to immigrants and the one explaining resistance to refugees. Regarding the resistance to refugees, the chapter analyses a curvilinear effect of the number of asylum applications. The hypotheses regarding the effect of the number of asylum applications and the recent change in asylum applications received mixed empirical support. Most of the individual-level hypotheses derived from ethnic competition theory gained strong empirical support. The hypotheses derived from localism theory gained somewhat less empirical support.