Human values and attitudes towards immigration and climate change in Germany: the moderating role of challenge and threat perceptions and political ideology

• Autor(a) principal: Zitzewitz, Julius Von
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/21718
• topic: Human values; Challenge and threat perceptions; Political ideology; Immigration; Climate change; Germany; Valores humanos; Percepções de desafio e ameaça; Ideologias políticas; Imigração; Mudanças climáticas; Alemanha

Immigration and climate change are the cause of heated debates among the German public. From a socio psychological perspective, it is crucial to understand which factors shape and influence opinions and attitudes towards these topics. We proposed the human values as developed by Schwartz (1992) as good determinants of attitudes towards immigration and climate change. The present study also examined how challenge and threat perceptions of either immigration or climate change influenced the relationship between human values, namely conservation and self-transcendence, and attitudes towards immigration, or climate change respectively, as well as attitudes towards institutional and social trust. We assumed that challenge and threat perceptions would moderate the tested relationships. Furthermore, we assumed that left- and right-wing ideologies would moderate the relationships in a similar way as challenge and threat perceptions would. We used data from the European Social Survey (ESS), round 7 and 8, from 2014 (N=3045) and from 2016 (N=2852) and conducted several moderation analyses. Our findings did not give substantial support to our assumptions as most of the moderation effects were either non-significant or very weak.