Societal Violence, National Identification, and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment: A Cross-national Study

Existing research shows that anti-immigrant attitudes are driven by a wide variety of individual- and contextual-level factors. The present study introduces “societal violence”—the degree to which human rights are violated and physical survival is threatened in society—as a significant, yet neglected, explanatory concept in analyzing negative attitudes toward immigrants. Data are drawn from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 2013. Two-level mixed effects models are estimated with random intercepts and slopes. Results show that societal violence significantly moderates the magnitude of the relationships between measures of national identification and negative sentiment toward immigrant among 27 280 respondents across 29 low- and high-income countries. More specifically, the associations are found to be greater in less violent societies.