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Correcting Citizens’ Misperceptions about non-Western Immigrants: Corrective Information, Interpretations, and Policy Opinions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2020

Frederik Juhl Jørgensen Open the ORCID record for Frederik Juhl Jørgensen [Opens in a new window]  and
Mathias Osmundsen Open the ORCID record for Mathias Osmundsen [Opens in a new window]
Frederik Juhl Jørgensen*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus, Denmark
Mathias Osmundsen
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus, Denmark
*
*Corresponding author. Email: fj@ps.au.dk
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Abstract

Can corrective information change citizens’ misperceptions about immigrants and subsequently lead to favorable immigration opinions? While prior studies from the USA document how corrections about the size of minority populations fail to change citizens’ immigration-related opinions, they do not examine how other facts that speak to immigrants’ cultural or economic dependency rates can influence immigration policy opinions. To extend earlier work, we conducted a large-scale survey experiment fielded to a nationally representative sample of Danes. We randomly expose participants to information about non-Western immigrants’ (1) welfare dependency rate, (2) crime rate, and (3) proportion of the total population. We find that participants update their factual beliefs in light of correct information, but reinterpret the information in a highly selective fashion, ultimately failing to change their policy preferences.

Keywords

public opinioninformationimmigrationbelief-updatingimmigration policy opinionssurvey experiment
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 64 - 73
Copyright
© The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2020

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Footnotes

The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/UCDET3 (Jørgensen and Osmundsen, 2019). We thank Mona Kleinberg, Bolette Danckert, participants at the Political Behavior workshop at Aarhus University, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. This paper was first presented at the 2018 Midwest Political Science Association Conference in Chicago. We have no conflicts of interest to report.

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https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/UCDET3
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