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Re-examining Socialization Theory: How Does Democracy Influence the Impact of Education on Anti-Foreigner Sentiment?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2016

Jens Peter Frølund Thomsen  and
Mark Olsen
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Abstract

Socialization theory claims that the ability of education to reduce anti-foreigner sentiment varies cross-nationally because state authorities are not equally committed to accepting ethnic minorities: higher educated persons harbor less anti-foreigner sentiment because they spend longer in educational institutions that impose official democratic values, which forbid negative reactions toward ethnic minorities. Consequently, higher educated persons ought to diverge from the lower educated as democratic institutions progress. Analyses support these claims: the impact of education on reducing anti-foreigner sentiment is strongest in the oldest democracies, moderate among the medium-aged (e.g., South European) democracies and weakest among the youngest (East European) democracies; and higher educated persons are disproportionately influenced by the maturation of democratic institutions. Analyses utilize data from the 28-country 2008 European Social Survey.

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Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , October 2017 , pp. 915 - 938
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark (email: froelund@ps.au.dk); Agency for Modernization, Ministry of Finance, Landgreven 4, P.O. box 2193, 1017 Copenhagen K (e-mail: marol@modst.dk). The authors wish to thank the three reviewers and Robert Johns, the Editor for many helpful suggestions. Previous versions of this article were presented at the Annual Scientific Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, Herzliya, 2013, and at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, 2014. Likewise, we wish to thank close colleagues – most notably Simon Calmar Andersen, Christoph Arndt, Anders Engrob Birkmose, Emily Cochran Bech, Martin Bækgaard, Jouni Kuha, Thomas J. Leeper, Kim Mannemar Sønderskov, and Søren Risbjerg Thomsen – for their comments on earlier drafts. Data replication sets are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/BJPolS. Online appendices are available at http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0007123415000496.

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