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Europeans support a proportional allocation of asylum seekers

Nature Human Behaviour volume 1, Article number: 0133 (2017) Cite this article

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Abstract

What type of common asylum regime would Europeans support? We conducted a survey asking 18,000 citizens of 15 European countries about their preferences regarding different mechanisms for allocating asylum seekers across countries. A large majority supports an allocation that is proportional to each country’s capacity over the status quo policy of allocation based on the country of first entry. This majority support is weakened but persists even among a randomly assigned subset of respondents who were made aware that moving to proportional allocation would increase the number of asylum seekers allocated to their own country. These results suggest that citizens care deeply about the fairness of the responsibility-sharing mechanism, rather than only the consequences of the asylum policy. The findings also highlight a potential pathway towards reform of the Common European Asylum System.

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Figure 1: Public support for increasing the number of asylum seekers.
Figure 2: Public support for various allocations of asylum seekers.
Figure 3: Support for proportional versus status quo allocation of asylum seekers.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant #100017_159820), which enabled data collection, and the Ford Foundation for operational support of the Immigration Policy Lab. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. We thank T. Huddleston, D. Laitin, D. Lawrence, R. Reich and J. Spirig for helpful advice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Immigration Policy Lab, Stanford University, Stanford, 94305, California, USA

    Kirk Bansak, Jens Hainmueller & Dominik Hangartner

  2. ETH Zurich, 8092, Zurich, Switzerland

    Kirk Bansak, Jens Hainmueller & Dominik Hangartner

  3. Department of Political Science, Stanford University, Stanford, 94305, California, USA

    Kirk Bansak, Jens Hainmueller & Dominik Hangartner

  4. Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, 94305, California, USA

    Kirk Bansak & Jens Hainmueller

  5. Center for Comparative and International Studies, ETH Zurich, Zurich, 8092, Switzerland

    Dominik Hangartner

  6. Department of Government, London School of Economics, London, WC2A 2AE, UK

    Dominik Hangartner

Authors
  1. Kirk Bansak
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  2. Jens Hainmueller
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  3. Dominik Hangartner
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Contributions

K.B., J.H. and D.H. conceived the research, designed the analyses, conducted the analyses and wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dominik Hangartner.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Discussion, Supplementary Tables (1–30), Supplementary Figures 1–7, Supplementary References (PDF 483 kb)

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Bansak, K., Hainmueller, J. & Hangartner, D. Europeans support a proportional allocation of asylum seekers. Nat Hum Behav 1, 0133 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0133

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