When Cleavages Travel: Transnational Updating in Turkish Diaspora Voting
With Mareike Heller and Serhat Karakayalı
Why do emigrants’ political preferences resemble those of peers at home? Research in political sociology suggests considerable stability in emigrants’ home-country political attitudes over the migration experience, yet central patterns and mechanisms of this transnational continuity remain unclear. This article distinguishes enduring effects of initial political socialization from ongoing transnational influence as explanations for continuity. We argue that emigrants’ subnational regional origin provides a useful lens to disentangle both channels empirically and introduce the notion of transnational updating: the dynamic alignment of emigrants’ political preferences with evolving political patterns in their regions of origin. Transnational updating is indication of ongoing, active, and likely bottom-up links connecting home-regions and the diaspora. The empirical analysis substantiates these considerations focusing on the voting behavior of Europe’s Turkish diaspora in external elections. Drawing on longitudinal data that link birthplace information for more than 1.7 million Turkish emigrants in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland to official election results for all Turkish elections and referenda between 2015 and 2023, we show that consulate-level voting outcomes closely mirror the regional origins of their electorates, demonstrating considerable continuity. Two-way fixed effects models further document that region-specific political shifts in Turkey are tracked abroad, consistent with ongoing transnational updating rather than static carryover alone. Supplementary survey analyses corroborate these patterns at the individual level. Our findings show that diaspora communities are neither fully politically resocialized abroad nor frozen in their premigration orientations. Instead, regional cleavages are dynamically reproduced across borders.
Read the preprint on OSF: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/hpbn7_v1
Local co-ethnic business networks and school-to-work transitions among the second generation
With Martin Ehlert, Benjamin Schulz and Alexander Dicks
What role do “ethnic” labor markets play in the school-to-work transitions of minority youth? We study how occupational aspirations and school-to-work transitions among second generation high-school students are affected by the local presence of businesses founded or headed by co-ethnic entrepreneurs. We combine geocoded survey data from the German National Educational Panel Study with data on business organizations drawn from the official trade register, which we augment using digital tools and with process generated data from an online service provider. We employ a choice-modelling framework and tackle selection and unobserved confounding using a fixed-effects approach.
Social reproduction among children of immigrants in Europe
With Nhat An Trinh
A wealth of empirical studies demonstrates that children of immigrants in Europe have lower levels of education, work less-skilled jobs, and receive lower incomes than children of native-born parents. But social science research has also sought to establish a second stylized fact: that children of immigrants are exceptionally socially mobile. Against this background, our objective is twofold: Firstly, we argue that the social origin of immigrants’ children is complex and comprises elements from the country of origin and the country of destination. We, therefore, propose to extend the classic Origin-Education-Destination (OED)-triangle into what we call the 3OED-pentagon. This extension allows us to precisely distinguish between pre- and post-migration mechanisms to study migration-specific aspects of intergenerational status transmission. Secondly, we draw on five pooled waves of the European Social Survey (2002-2010) to empirically explore three complementary explanations for reportedly higher social mobility among children of immigrants in previous research. The first hypothesis is that low estimates of social reproduction in previous research are measurement artefacts. We test it by comparing results from the conventional OED model to our extended 3OED model. Our second hypothesis argues that lower social reproduction is a substantive feature of the migration processes. Migration devalues various resources of the parental generation, which in turn reduces opportunities for higher status immigrant parents to confer advantage. We test this hypothesis through decomposition and simulation techniques. Our final hypothesis argues that social reproduction among children of immigrants and natives is in fact similar, but that immigrant parents tend to settle in regions which are generally conducive to their children’s upward mobility. To test this explanation, we rely on regional fixed-effects. Results of our analyses suggest that higher social mobility of the children of immigrants is a substantive feature of the migration process.
Environmental quality, local infrastructures, and residential choice: A survey experiment on ethnic differences in neighborhood preferences
With Christian König, Jan Paul Heisig, Merlin Schaeffer and Tobias Rüttenauer
Stratification research increasingly recognizes that inequalities are location dependent, that is, clustered in space, with neighborhoods often being the locus of inequality . One crucial dimension of spatial inequality is environmental quality (e.g., pollution levels or proximity to green spaces). Environmental quality at the place of residence has been shown to affect health and life chances more broadly. From the literature on “environmental justice”, we know that some population subgroups are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards at their place of residence. The processes that underlie this empirical regularity are not well understood, however. Studies have shown that ethnic minorities bear a disproportionate burden of environmental hazards at the neighborhood level, even after controlling for income and other aspects of socio-economic status. Therefore, purely economic explanations of selective in- and out-migration appear insufficient for explaining the spatial distribution of environmental goods and bads observed. We develop a conjoint survey experiment aimed to test the role of residential preferences as a possible explanation of population sorting that is difficult to assess with observational data. Within our survey experiment, respondents of immigrant and non-immigrant origins will be presented with several pairs of neighborhood profiles and will be asked to choose in which of these neighborhoods they would rather live in. The different neighborhood profiles will be random combinations of several key attributes that might affect residential choices. The experiment allows us to separate, and thereby disentangle, the role of factors that are empirically correlated, most importantly environmental quality and the presence of co-ethnics and ethnic infrastructures.
Jonas Wiedner 