The feeling of falling behind: societal fear and anti-immigration attitudes among manual workers

Existing research on working class discontent and anti-immigration attitudes investigates the importance of economic and cultural threats in detailed and systematic manners, primarily through cognitively based measures. In the present study I shift the focus to more generalized emotions towards the societal development overall. I find that members of the manual working class do not hold more negative societal emotions than others. Furthermore, feelings of fear, not anger, are significantly related to anti-immigration attitudes in the population at large. Importantly, this relationship is stronger among manual workers than other classes. In other words, manual workers are not experiencing more societal fear than others, but when afraid, they direct their attention towards immigrants as a class-specific threat. The paper informs the societal debate on working class discontent—and it adds empirical evidence to the scholarly dispute about the relationship between anger, fear and political attitudes.