Is there really a 'consensus' on refugees? Evidence from a 10-country study

Previous research claims to have found ‘consensus’ both within and between countries about preferred refugee traits (e.g. whether respondents prefer highly educated refugees) as well as attitudes to refugee policy (e.g whether refugee intake should be increased). But most of this research has been conducted on European countries and has not distinguished between different forms of consensus. Using an original survey dataset from 10 countries spanning the Americas, Europe and Oceania, we find a strong degree of within-country relative consensus: regardless of age, education, gender, religiosity, intergroup contact, or social class, residents tend to rank ‘job skills and experience’ as the most important refugee trait and shared race, religion or ethnicity as the least important. They also endorse the economic and humanitarian value of refugee admissions while agreeing much less strongly with increasing refugee intake. We even find evidence of ‘absolute consensus’ in certain countries regarding attitudes to refugee policy and admissions. Our results mostly hold up even after testing them on an entirely separate dataset–Round 8 of the European Social Survey. Overall, our findings are consistent with the idea that refugee attitudes are shaped by sociotropic economic concerns rather than ‘egocentric’ factors or explanations based on intergroup contact, conflict or cultural similarity.