Economic Vulnerability, Cultural Decline, and Nativism: Contingent and Indirect Effects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective Nativism, or anti‐immigrant preferences, is increasingly evident within democratic mass publics. In this article, we explore whether economic concerns, perceptions of social decline, or some combination of the two shape these attitudes. Method Our data are comprised of more than 8,000 survey respondents from nine Western, industrial democracies (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the United States). Using mediation analysis, we test for the extent to which economic anxiety and perceptions of cultural decline exert direct and indirect effects on nativism. Results On balance, the effect of economic anxiety—concern regarding job loss and negative economic assessments—on nativism is mostly indirect, affecting nativism by influencing perceptions of cultural decline. Conclusion Given the strong association between perceptions of social decline and nativism, it appears as though anti‐immigrant sentiments draw from cultural rather than economic concerns. The story, however, does not end there. Perceptions of societal decline are strongly influenced by economic anxiety.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".