ABSTRACT
This chapter presents attitude patterns across various European countries, in order to assess the influence of national context variables. Group conflict theory is used as a generic term covering various theories that share the central premise that negative attitudes toward other social groups are essentially rooted in perceived intergroup competition for scarce goods. Since the 1990s, Europe has experienced increasing immigration flows, and simultaneous electoral successes of anti-immigration parties. These tendencies have revived scientific attention to the perceptions of ethnic threat and to anti-immigration attitudes. Group conflict theory claims that perceptions of threat are the driving forces behind anti-immigration attitudes, and elaborates on the roots of such threat perceptions. The chapter attempts to tackle several issues that might be responsible for the confused state of the field. Self-interest theory postulates that threat perceptions are, in the first place, a function of an individual's economic position.
