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Immigration and the sociocultural divide in Central and Eastern Europe: Stasis or evolution?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2026

Caroline Marie Lancaster Open the ORCID record for Caroline Marie Lancaster [Opens in a new window]
Caroline Marie Lancaster*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
*
Address for Correspondence: Caroline Marie Lancaster,Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States. Email: cml93@live.unc.edu
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Abstract

Immigration has historically been of low salience in Central and Eastern Europe. Yet, the region has consistently higher levels of ethnocentrism than the rest of Europe. Scholars argue that the East's limited politicization of immigration is due to its status as a region of emigration and the presence of ethnic minority ‘others’. I argue that this is changing. The politicization of the European refugee crisis by domestic elites has begun to refocus the sociocultural dimension on the immigration issue. Using structural equation models, I compare European Values Study data from 2008 and 2017 across 10 East European EU member states. I find evidence that traditionalist attitudes are more strongly related to anti‐immigration attitudes since the crisis, particularly for those who are interested in politics. Further, immigration attitudes are polarizing across the GAL‐TAN dimension and by education. Hence, immigration is bolstering a pre‐existing, socially structured divide around both nationalist and traditionalist values.

Keywords

post‐communist statespolitical attitudesimmigration attitudesnationalismEuropean union politics

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Type
Research Articles
Information
European Journal of Political Research , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , May 2022 , pp. 544 - 565
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 European Consortium for Political Research

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