Results I: The Importance of Sociopolitical Conditions

The conceptual framework developed in Chap. 3 posits that sociopolitical conditions constitute important yet understudied determinants of migrant integration outcomes in Western Europe. I also derived two hypotheses about the effects of two such sociopolitical conditions, political polarization (H1) and discriminatory climates (H4). I now test these hypotheses by estimating multilevel models on a large sample of migrants residing in 14 Western European countries between 2016 and 2022, based on data provided by the European Social Survey (ESS). Analyzing these data with said estimation method, I find that political polarization and discriminatory climates significantly reduce migrants’ political participation and host country identification, respectively, which provides support for both H1 and H4. These results are robust to a series of alternative model specifications and additional analyses, including alternative dependent variables, a visual inspection of potential outliers, and falsification tests. This chapter begins with the descriptive statistics, followed by the results of the main models. I then report the results from five robustness checks and auxiliary analyses, and conclude with a discussion of the findings’ implications and connections to the broader literature.