Conditional Inclusion: Unraveling Preferences around Citizens’ Attitudes towards Immigrant Rights

Abstract

Contemporary democracies are becoming increasingly diverse due to immigration, raising challenges of integrating new residents. Although research shows that immigrants’ social and economic outcomes improve when governments pass inclusive integration policies, immigrants often remain excluded from the political decision-making process and face conditional or restricted access to social rights. This dissertation examines when and under what conditions are citizens willing to include immigrants in the political and social community, focusing on how citizens evaluate immigrants’ access to political and social rights and what drives variation in preferences.

Drawing on literature on attitudes towards immigrants, deservingness, integration, and in- and out-group boundary making, this dissertation expands on the concept of conditional inclusion. This captures expectations that minorities, including immigrants, are subjected to for acceptance in society. This dissertation theorizes how citizens negotiate group boundaries across two policy areas: political and social rights. It considers the criteria citizens prioritize when considering immigrants’ access to various rights, in particular, integration-related requirements. It then it examines how these preferences are shaped by socio-demographic characteristics, political orientation, partisanship, more deep-seated in- and out-group orientations, and psychological predispositions.

Empirically, this dissertation uses original survey data collected in six democracies (Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US) and employs various quantitative and survey experiment methods. Across four articles, the findings show that citizens’ support for immigrant rights is neither unconditional nor uniformly exclusionary. Instead, inclusion is indeed conditional, whereby access to rights are granted in exchange for perceived integration, economic contribution and adherence to in-group norms.

This dissertation demonstrates that conditional inclusion is consistent across countries and policy domains. Importantly, conditional inclusion establishes that support or opposition to immigrants’ rights is driven less by economic or cultural threat alone but encompasses deeper-seated beliefs toward group boundaries and reflects citizens’ expectations of how their democracy should function. By shifting attention from abstract support for inclusion to evaluations of concrete policy designs, this research clarifies how citizens understand immigrant membership and highlights the central role of conditionality in contemporary democratic inclusion debates.

Keywords: immigrant enfranchisement, attitudes towards immigrants, public opinion, immigrant social rights, immigrant inclusion, immigrant voting rights, conditional inclusion