Results II: Psychological Mechanisms Underlying Integration

In the previous chapter, I presented evidence indicating that political polarization and discriminatory climates negatively impact migrants’ political participation and host country identification, respectively. My conceptual framework and the hypotheses derived from it, specifically Hypotheses 2 and 5, posit that both of these effects are mediated by migrants’ (un)met expectations of their host country. I test these two hypotheses by conducting two original survey experiments, each involving 700 migrants residing in four Western European countries. Using causal mediation analysis, I find only partial support for Hypothesis 2 (i.e., the relationship between political polarization and participation being mediated by expectations), likely due to the experimental manipulation not working as well as intended. In contrast, there is strong evidence in favor of Hypothesis 5, that is, the assertion that the negative effect of discriminatory climates on migrants’ host country identification is mediated by their expectations. I discuss the results of each survey separately, beginning with a brief note on quality control, followed by a presentation of the descriptive statistics, hypothesis tests, and robustness checks. This chapter ends with a discussion of the implications of the results and their connections to the broader literature.