From Individual Attitudes towards Migrants to Migration Policy Outcomes: Theory and Evidence / IZA Publications, May 2008
PDF - http://ftp.iza.org/dp3512.pdf
Giovanni Facchini, Anna Maria Mayda
“In democratic societies individual attitudes of voters represent the foundations of policy making. We start by analyzing patterns in public opinion on migration and find that, across countries of different income levels, only a small minority of voters favour more open migration policies. Next we investigate the determinants of voters' preferences towards immigration from a theoretical and empirical point of view. Our analysis supports the role played by economic channels (labour market, welfare state, efficiency gains) using both the 1995 and 2003 rounds of the ISSP survey. The second part of the paper examines how attitudes translate into a migration policy outcome.”