Arguing about immigration: Exploring the (un)common grounds with open-ended survey responses

Political disagreement is typically operationalized as the distance between conflicting parties’ self-placement on a scale measuring support for a given policy. This provides a straightforward measure of which groups are divided on the issue, and to what extent. However, disagreement is more than attitude divergence. It involves beliefs about competing arguments, and judgments about how they relate to each other. This paper presents a novel approach to the study of issue disagreement, understood in terms of belief congruence. Using open-ended survey questions fielded in a probability based survey representative of the Norwegian population (N = 1820), it identifies arguments recognized as salient by individuals on both sides of the immigration debate, distinguishing those endorsed by individuals belonging to both camps from those exclusive to either side. In this way, the paper provides a substantive overview of the span and contents of the (un)common grounds that exist in the way conflicting parties construct the case for their own and each other's positions. Concerns that biased information processing accounts for many or even most cases in which political opponents fail to recognize each others’ perspectives has led some to identify a lack of engagement with opposing perspectives as the main culprit behind attitude conflict in politics. While several studies find that awareness of opposing arguments promotes tolerance of disagreement, a growing number of studies have identified circumstances in which considering the opposition’s perspective backfires, inducing negative rather than positive interpersonal outcomes. To make sense of these mixed findings, Sassenrath and colleagues (2016) proposed that the effects of perspective-taking is moderated by perceptions of self-other overlap. In short, awareness of conflicting arguments promotes tolerance of disagreement when these arguments are congruent with one’s own belief system, but backfires when it reveals that the target is “too dissimilar to the self” (Sassenrath et al. 2016). In such cases, disagreement is not about who has the most convincing arguments, but what counts as relevant or even appropriate arguments in the first place. In light of this, the overarching aim of my project is to investigate what we can learn about political disagreement by understanding it in terms of belief (in)congruence, rather than reducing it to attitude divergence. I focus on the broad issue area of immigration, which has been at the center of considerable controversy in recent years. Immigration is not a contained policy area, but cuts across several disparate areas of concern including but not restricted to national identity, social cohesion, humanitarian aid, language, welfare provision, law and order, terrorism, security, cultural practices, labor shortage and job availability. This multidimensionality means that it engages many potential lines of conflict, including the traditional left-right cleavages and increasingly relevant tensions concerning so-called “cultural values”.