Regional Labor Markets, Residential Mobility, and Anti-Immigration Attitudes (with Sergi Pardos-Prado)
Speaker: (opens in a new window)Denis Cohen (Mannheim Centre for European Social Research)
Wednesday, November 29, 14:00–14:45 (Irish time)
Please register (opens in a new window)here to receive the link and password to the online meeting and information on the room at UCD.
Abstract: What explains regional differences in anti-immigration policy preferences? Since the turn of the 21st century, regional environments have become crucial correlates of anti-immigration and globalization backlash, even beyond individual and country-level variables. However, the reasons behind geographical patterns of political preferences are unclear. We argue that dynamics of inter-regional residential relocation into regional labor markets with high demand for individuals' labor are key to understanding processes of geographical self-selection. We test our argument using georeferenced panel data from the GSOEP in combination with detailed information on the dynamics of regional labor markets, obtained through original aggregations of rich annual survey data from the German microcensus. Our findings confirm that prospects of intra-individual reductions in economic risk drive moving decisions and subsequently reduce anti-immigration sentiment, especially among workers with portable skills. This has decisive macro-level implications: net of various structural differences, regions receiving a large share of risk-reducing movers over time show lower aggregate levels of anti-immigration sentiment.
About the speaker: Denis Cohen is a Senior Research Fellow in the Data and Methods Unit at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim. He is also the lead organizer of the MZES Social Science Data Lab as well as co-founder and co-editor of the blog Methods Bites, where he regularly contributes tutorials on research methods and social data science.
He studies context-dependent explanations of political preferences and voting behavior, the drivers and outcomes of party competition in multiparty democracies, and the causes and effects of strategic elite behavior. His ongoing work embeds these perspectives in analyses of the political consequences of geo-spatial inequalities. Methodologically, he focuses on advanced statistical modeling, georeferenced data, data visualization, and causal inference.