The inner structure and change of attitudes toward migrants between 2002 and 2015 in Hungary based on data from the European Social Survey(ESS)

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, we analyze the Hungarian population’s attitudes toward migrants in 2002 and 2015. First, we examined the inner structure of this attitude: we were curious whether being a xenophobe or a xenophile had the same meaning in the two years under research. Results showed that the same set of variables could be used to form the composite variable measuring the attitudes toward migrants, and their “mixture” also has the same structure. These results made it possible to analyze and compare models explaining these attitudes. However, we also found that the position of the scales of these latent variables differs, therefore their means cannot be compared. In the second part of our paper, we scrutinized the factors influencing attitudes toward migrants. Among the demographic variables, age and the type of settlement had significant effects. “Soft” variables measuring attitudes such as gatekeeping attitudes, social distance, realistic and symbolic threat significantly affect the attitudes toward migrants, and by 2015 their effects increase. Keywords: immigration, intergroup threat theory, confirmative factor analysis, invariance testing