Immigration and Political Distrust in Europe

European countries have witnessed a steady rise of political distrust over thepast decades, which coincides with the rise of mass immigration. Building onexisting research regarding anti-immigration attitudes and political trust, thisstudy presents two possible theoretical mechanisms through which actualimmigration trends could generate political distrust in host societies: eitherthrough cultural change or through negative evaluations of institutionalperformance. To empirically test these, I employ a multi-level comparativelongitudinal research design using micro-attitudinal data from the EuropeanSocial Survey for 17 European countries (2002–16). The results do notfindsupport for the cultural hypothesis, as there is no evidence of an overallrelationship between growth in foreign populations and citizen distrust inpolitical institutions. However, there is support for the institutionalperformance hypothesis, whereby growth in foreign populations is associatedwith higher political distrust amongst individuals who have anti-immigrationattitudes. The implication of thesefindings is that mass immigration is not thecentral cause of the decline of political trust Europe, however, it may havebeen a factor in the growing distrust amongst a relatively small sub-group ofcitizens.