| Abstract |
How malleable are adult migrants' political attitudes? This paper investigates political (re-)socialization in the migratory context. It theorizes a new attitudinal typology distinguishing polity-specific attitudes, influenced primarily by the national context, and transnational attitudes, forged by the migratory experience. It transposes the typology onto four main dimensions of political competition in contemporary Europe: economic redistribution, homosexuality, European integration, and immigration. To test the new theory, the paper combines cross-sectional and panel data spanning almost 380,000 observations from 106 sending and 28 destination countries. It introduces a novel strategy to model cross-classified hierarchical data, devises several methodological innovations to address issues inherent to group comparison, and pioneers two empirical inquiries into migrants' self-selection. The results question adults' attitudinal stability. Migration prompts the acculturation of polity-specific attitudes and the cosmopolitanization of transnational attitudes. These findings carry major implications for our understanding of attitudinal stability and change, and the dimensionality of the ideological space. |