News Detail

Lukas Rudolph, ETH Zurich

Europe's refugee crisis, intergroup contact and asylum attitudes

Abstract:

Do large influxes of asylum seekers, such as during the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe, lead to an attitudinal backlash against refugees and migrants? In recent work, the findings are mixed, with contact leading in some contexts to increases and in some to decreases in anti-migration attitudes. These recent papers generally draw on exogenous factors determining the geographical dispersion of asylum seekers to test for a macro-level effect of refugee inflow. We use original survey data from Austria to assess whether the increased presence of refugees has attitudinal consequences. Combining municipality-level refugee inflow data and survey evidence on self-reported individual contact, perceived threat, and attitudes towards immigration and asylum, we test whether and under which conditions the contact hypothesis finds support on the individual level. We thereby contribute to understanding conflicting macro-level results and more generally provide an indication whether and when refugee flows lead to attitudinal backlash.

(co-authored with Markus Wagner)

Dr. Lukas Rudolph is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Comparative and International Studies, ETH Zurich. He contributes as well to the Swiss Minerals Observatory project at the Institute of Science, Technology and Policy of ETH Zurich. His research interests include political behavior and the role of institutions in a comparative/political economy perspective. Lukas also has a strong interest in questions of political methodology, especial design-based inference. His work has been published in Journal of Politics, Political Science Research and Methods and Political Behavior amongst others.  

Lukas received his PhD from LMU Munich, Germany, in 2018. He was a visiting fellow at Duke University for the 2016 EITM Institute. Lukas holds a Magister Artium (M.A. and B.A. equivalent) in Political Science, Intercultural Communication and International Law and a Bachelor degree (B.Sc.) in Economics, both from LMU Munich.