“Expanding Theory on Attitudes Toward Migrants” with Daniel Masterson, Yale

ISPS EXPERIMENTS WORKSHOP

Abstract: Despite developments in research on attitudes toward migrants, numerous important questions remain unanswered, some for want of asking and others due to mistakes made in existing research. In contrast to economic models of attitudes toward migrants, recent experimental research highlights the explanatory power of sociotropic motivations. We seek to test whether these findings are driven by a failure to prime or measure egotropic determinants of attitudes toward migrants, for example, NIMBY-ism and competition from large groups of migrants. A single migrant arriving in a respondent’s country may not trigger egotropic mechanisms because the respondent need not imagine the individual migrant living nearby or posing meaningful labor market competition. We propose direct tests of NIMBY-ism and group-level labor-market competition. Furthermore, we propose theorizing and expanding research to developing countries, where economic and security concerns may be much more acute, and thereby explore whether existing findings are driven by research-site selection in rich, post-industrial Western countries.

Speaker: Daniel Masterson is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Yale University. During 2015-2017 Dan is also a visiting researcher at the American University in Beirut’s Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs. He specializes in comparative politics, with a regional focus on the Middle East. In his work Dan applies a variety of methods, including statistical analysis, qualitative field work, and survey research, to study refugees, exile, and displacement; collective action; conflict and political violence; the politics of humanitarian aid; and the political economy of development.