Bohman, Andrea. ‘Who’s Welcome and Who’s Not? Opposition towards Immigration in the Nordic Countries, 2002–2014’. Scandinavian Political Studies, vol. 41, no. 3, Sept. 2018, pp. 283–306.
This article demonstrates the analytical advantages of studying not only the degree to which people oppose immigration in a country, but also the character of their opposition. Using Latent Class Analysis and data from the European Social Survey, Nordic patterns and trends are examined with the aim of identifying different kinds of immigration attitudes and how they develop in different national contexts. The Nordic countries are interesting to compare as, while they are similar in many respects, they also diverge significantly from each other in areas theoretically considered important to the formation of attitudes towards immigration. Studying the character of immigration opposition reveals five different types of immigration attitudes. These are differently distributed between the Nordic countries as well as over time, and include nativist opposition (opposition only towards immigrants of ethnic/racial groups other than that of the majority population) and economic opposition (opposition that entails a separation between immigrants considered to be an economic resource and an economic burden). By demonstrating how immigration opposition in the Nordic countries varies not only in degree but also in character, the article contributes to a deeper understanding of the nature of immigration opposition as well as of how different attitudinal profiles evolve under different contextual circumstances.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9477.12120