In 'Change in migrants’ political attitudes: Acculturation and cosmopolitanization', Eva Krejcova and her co-authors EUI Professor Filip Kostelka and Nicolas Sauger (Sciences Po) describe how migration can redefine how people view politics and society, challenging the notion that political attitudes are formed once and for all in early adulthood and showing that experiences later in life can still shift perspectives.
We asked Eva Krejcova, former Max Weber Fellow and currently Visiting Fellow at the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences, how these findings reshape debates about political integration and democratic life in diverse societies.
Many studies suggest that people’s political views remain stable in adulthood. What does your research show about how migration can challenge that assumption?
Our research shows that moving to another country can, in fact, reshape people’s political views, even well into adulthood. Drawing on nearly 380,000 observations from more than 100 countries, we find that migration can dramatically transform individuals’ political attitudes and beliefs.
This transformation happens through multiple pathways. Some attitudes change as migrants adapt to the norms, institutions, and political culture of their new society, while others are shaped by the experience of migrating itself. One of the major contributions of our study is to theorise and test which attitudes are more likely to follow each path of change.
By focusing specifically on people who migrated as adults, rather than second-generation migrants or those who moved as children, we demonstrate that political attitudes are more flexible than previously assumed. Moving to a new society can reshape and have a lasting impact on how people think about politics and the world. In this sense, our findings question the long-standing idea that political views are fixed after early adulthood and highlight how life experiences, even later in life, can influence how people understand politics and society.
You distinguish between attitudes shaped by national context and those shaped by migration itself. Why is this distinction important for understanding issues like redistribution, homosexuality, immigration, and European integration?
This distinction helps us understand how and why different political attitudes change after migration. Some attitudes are primarily shaped by the national context – what we call polity-specific attitudes – while others are more directly influenced by the experience of migration itself, which we refer to as transnational attitudes.
For example, views on redistribution or homosexuality tend to be polity-specific. Migrants’ opinions on these issues are often informed by both their countries of origin and destination, gradually shifting toward the dominant views of the society in which they now live. In contrast, other attitudes, like support for immigration or European integration, are transnational. On these issues, migrants often become and stay more supportive than people in both their home and host countries. Understanding the difference between these pathways helps explain why some attitudes align with the host society, while others reflect the unique perspective brought by migration.
Your study considers both the country migrants come from and the country they move to. Why is it important to look at both when studying how attitudes change?
Studying both the country of origin and the country of destination is key for correctly interpreting migrants’ attitudes. Without this dual perspective, we risk misunderstanding what migration actually changes. For example, noting that a migrant is more supportive of redistribution than people in their host country is informative, but without considering the sending country’s stance, we cannot know whether migration led to a rise or decline in their support. The same logic applies to other attitudes, such as trust in institutions or views on democracy: The direction and magnitude of change can only be understood in a truly comparative framework.
However, comparing migrants’ attitudes with those of people in both their sending and host countries simultaneously is methodologically challenging. To overcome this, we developed a new modeling strategy that combines the estimated dependent variable approach with the logic of counterfactuals. This method allows us, for the first time, to simulate what migrants’ attitudes would look like if they had remained in their home country, and to disentangle the effects of the national context from those of migration itself.
Some argue that people who migrate already hold different political views from those who stay behind. How did you test this idea, and what did you find?
The possibility that migrants are politically different from those who stay behind – what we call self-selection – is a major concern in studies of migration. If migrants are politically different from the start, it becomes difficult to attribute changes in their attitudes to the experience of migration itself.
We addressed this issue in two complementary ways. First, we examined survey data on migration intentions, comparing individuals who said they were considering emigration with those who wanted to stay. This analysis revealed that both groups held largely the same attitudes once we accounted for factors such as age and education.
Second, we used panel data that tracks the same individuals over time to identify those who eventually did emigrate. This allowed us to compare whether future emigrants already differ from stayers. Again, we did not find any systematic differences in attitudes between the two groups.
Together, these findings provide strong evidence that self-selection cannot account for the attitudinal changes we observe. In other words, migration itself – not pre-existing differences – drives the processes of acculturation and cosmopolitanisation that shape how migrants think about politics and society.
Eva Krejcova is a former Max Weber Fellow (2023-2025) at the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences. She is currently a Junior Lecturer at the University of Lausanne and a Visiting Fellow at the EUI. Eva holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on electoral behaviour and political attitudes in contemporary Europe.
Read the full article 'Change in migrants’ political attitudes: Acculturation and cosmopolitanization', led by Eva Krejcova and co-authors Filip Kostelka, and Nicolas Sauger, published in the American Journal of Political Science.