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Abstract

Although a large body of research demonstrates that policymakers generally respond to citizens’ preferences, immigration issues are often thought to elude this model of representation. It has been widely argued that immigration policymaking is characterized by an “opinion-policy gap” whereby immigration policies are more permissive than public preferences. However, we argue that immigration policy preferences have been poorly measured. Adopting a multidimensional approach, we disaggregate immigration into its component policies and focus specifically on asylum policy preferences. We test whether current asylum policies align with public opinion in Britain using an original conjoint experiment with realistic policy choices relative to the status quo. Contrary to the gap hypothesis, we show that the British public is not consistently in favor of more restrictive asylum policies. Our findings suggest that immigration policy preferences can be better understood by disaggregating the multidimensional policy field of immigration.

Keywords

immigration attitudes asylum policy policy preferences‌

A government’s ability to respond to public policy preferences has long been held as a cornerstone of representative democracy (Dahl 1971). Existing research shows that policymakers are generally attuned and responsive to public opinion (Page and Shapiro 1983; Stimson, Mackuen and Erikson 1995; Cohen 1997; Wlezien 2004; Hobolt and Klemmensen 2008).¹ Immigration policy, however, has often been treated as an important exception to this pattern. Many scholars argue that immigration policymaking is characterized by a pervasive “opinion-policy gap” whereby immigration policies are consistently more permissive than the public would prefer (Freeman 1995).

There is reason to be skeptical of the evidence for the exceptionalism of immigration. Not least, because research on policy responsiveness typically relies on single measures of public opinion and rarely focuses explicitly on policies under government control. Public immigration preferences tend to be captured by reference to whether immigration levels should be increased, decreased or kept the same (Freeman 1995; Schuck 2007; Facchini and Mayda 2008) or whether immigration is the most important issue facing the country (Hobolt and Klemmemsen 2005; Jennings 2009). Neither method truly captures policy preferences. Preferred immigration levels do not map onto the actual policy levers governments have available (Levy, Wright, and Citrin 2016) and perceptions of the “most important problem” both depend on the salience of other issues and do not discriminate between restrictive and permissive views (Hatton 2021).

In this study, we directly measure a range of asylum policy preferences among the British public against current government policy. Using a conjoint experimental design with a nationally representative sample we disaggregate asylum policy into its multiple component policies: safe third country provisions, detention, deportation, access to legal aid, housing, work, medical care, and cash payment support. We vary the measures in a way which allows us to tell whether the public would favor more restrictive or more permissive policies relative to current government policy without giving information on the status quo. We are thus able to test the congruence between immigration preferences and actual policies.

Contrary to the expectations of the opinion-policy gap hypothesis, we find that the British public does not systematically favor the implementation of more restrictive asylum policies. Rather, people tend to oppose any changes to current government policy. Immigration, we demonstrate, is not necessarily an exception to policy responsiveness. As we highlight, it is necessary to adopt fine-grained measurement tools that reflect the multidimensionality of policy when investigating public attitudes toward immigration.

Immigration Policy Preferences

To understand immigration attitudes, many studies have attempted to discern the characteristics that host populations consider most desirable in immigrants (Helbling and Kriesi 2014; Hainmueller and Hopkins 2015; Ford and Mellon 2020; Donnaloja 2022). Recently, this line of inquiry has expanded to include an examination of the preferred traits exhibited by asylum-seekers (Bansak, Hainmueller, and Hangartner 2016; Hager and Veit 2019; Von Hermanni and Neumann 2019). While this body of literature has greatly enhanced our insight into the kinds of immigrants favored by the public, our understanding of public preferences regarding the actual policies that govern their entry, removal, and entitlement to different rights remains limited and highly fragmented.²

We make three contributions. First, we adopt a multidimensional approach to immigration policy preferences and thereby respond to recent calls for a new research agenda which “provides a more accurate and nuanced understanding of immigration policy preferences, as opposed to only analysing preferences for one immigration policy dimension” (Helbling, Maxwell, and Traunmüller 2023, 3; see also Kustov 2021). Existing work tends to investigate public preferences for immigration control policies and integration policies in isolation from one other. On the one hand, immigration control policies govern the entry and removal of foreign citizens. This includes rules concerning admissions, border control protocols, as well as detention and deportation policies. On the other hand, integration policies govern the allocation of rights to foreign citizens, such as access to the labor market, healthcare, and housing. While this important distinction between immigration control policies and integration policies has long been established in the immigration literature (Hammar 1985; Tichenor 2002), it has remained largely insulated from public opinion research. Most of the immigration attitudes scholarship has focused on public preferences regarding a singular dimension of immigration control policy: the number and type of immigrants who should come to the country (Mayda 2006; Ramos, Pereira, and Vala 2020). While a few studies have investigated public attitudes toward integration policies — notably the allocation of welfare benefits to immigrants (Kolbe and Crepaz 2016; Muñoz and Pardos-Prado 2019) — these preferences are often examined in isolation. However, recent findings suggest that an integrated approach to immigration policy preferences may be warranted. In an important contribution, Margalit and Solodoch (2022) suggest that public support can differ between immigration control policies aimed at restricting immigrant “flows” and integration policies aimed at governing the rights of immigrant “stocks.”

As a second contribution, we address the specific question of asylum policy preferences. Most studies investigating immigration policy support rely on survey items that do not enable respondents to differentiate between different types of immigration. In other words, they fail to disaggregate immigration as a policy field. This is puzzling considering that we know public support for immigrants differs depending on the type of immigration being discussed. In the United Kingdom, for instance, high-skilled immigrants and students are viewed more favorably than asylum-seekers (Ford, Jennings, and Somerville 2015; Richards, Fernández-Reino, and Blinder 2023). Despite this, public preferences over policies concerning asylum-seekers have received minimal attention. The few existing studies that investigate such policy preferences have focused on immigration control policies (Bansak, Hainmueller, and Hangartner 2017; Heizmann and Ziller 2019; Jeannet, Heidland and Ruhs 2021). Little is known about public preferences toward integration policies concerning asylum-seekers. This gap in our understanding of asylum policy preferences is surprising given the salience of asylum-seeking immigration amongst voters. In the United Kingdom, for example, Blinder (2015) shows that people predominantly think about asylum-seekers when answering survey questions about immigration.

For our third contribution, we revisit the opinion-policy gap and suggest a way to overcome the serious measurement issues that surround it. In the 1990s, Freeman famously proposed that immigration politics in liberal democracies were characterized by an “expansionary bias” (Freeman 1995, 886). He argued that the gap between public preferences and immigration policy in liberal democracies was “large and systematic” (Freeman 2002, 77). Since then, scholars have repeatedly asserted the existence of an opinion-policy gap in the field of immigration (Schuck 2007; Facchini and Mayda 2008; Freeman, Hansen, and Leal 2013; Lutz 2019). The supposed discrepancy between the restrictive preferences of the public and the permissive nature of immigration policies has even been caricatured as an “iron law” of immigration policymaking (Lutz 2019, 174).³

Yet Freeman also called Britain a “deviant case” in its ability to limit unwanted immigration (Freeman 1994, 297). He argued that while public opinion was in favor of immigration restrictionism, British immigration policies were also largely restrictive. Hansen (2000) similarly suggested that Britain had been comparatively effective in controlling immigration. Neither of them, however, tested the congruence between policies and public opinion. According to Somerville (2007, 4), claims of British exceptionalism are both exaggerated and outdated. Comparing policy responsiveness in Britain and Denmark between 1970 and 2002, Hobolt and Klemmemsen (2005) find that the British government is not responsive to public opinion on immigration. Meanwhile, Ford, Jennings, and Somerville (2015, 1407) claim that the policy gap has been “reopened” by increasing constraints on policymakers’ ability to restrict immigration.⁴

Existing research on the opinion-policy gap suffers from several limitations. To date, there have been two main approaches to the measurement of immigration policy preferences. The first is the preferred-immigration-level approach. Public opinion is captured by a single question in opinion surveys asking respondents whether they believe the number of immigrants should be reduced, increased, or remain the same (Freeman 1995; Schuck 2007; Facchini and Mayda 2008). Testing whether this question captures actual policy preferences in the United States, however, Levy, Wright, and Citrin (2016) find that general preferences for less immigration can coexist with humanitarian and sociotropic considerations that ultimately result in less restrictive policy preferences.

The other main approach in the opinion-policy gap scholarship is to employ issue salience as a proxy for public opinion. This most-important-problem approach similarly relies on a single survey question, this time asking respondents about their views on the most important issue facing their country (Hobolt and Klemmemsen 2005; Jennings 2009). This approach has two drawbacks. First, issue salience is a relative measure. It tells us how important the public perceives immigration to be relative to other issues. Second, issue salience measures do not enable us to adjudicate between “the importance of issues and the degree to which they are a problem” (Wlezien 2005, 556). Rather, they conflate individuals who think immigration is an important issue with those who hold restrictionist views. Deeming immigration an important issue, however, is not necessarily synonymous with favoring restrictions on immigration (Hatton 2021).

Both approaches treat immigration policy preferences as unidimensional: the public is expected to consistently favor enhanced restrictiveness or consistently favor enhanced permissiveness. One exception is a recent study by Jeannet, Heidland, and Ruhs (2021) offering an important comparative perspective on Europeans’ asylum and refugee policy preferences through a conjoint experiment. While this study convincingly embraces a multidimensional approach, it exclusively delves into immigration control policies, overlooking integration policy preferences. Moreover, it focuses on “the basic principles underlying (…) policies rather than the actual policies adopted by governments” (Jeannet, Heidland, and Ruhs 2021, 359). It cannot, therefore, be used to test the existence of an opinion-policy gap.

In this study, we circumvent these measurement issues by looking at voters’ specific asylum policy preferences. By doing so, we are able to directly test whether current policy matches what people want in a multidimensional and realistic policy environment.

Research Design, Data, and Measurement

We focus on asylum policy in the United Kingdom in our conjoint experiment. The selection of policy attributes was driven by two considerations. First, we referred to existing scholarship to identify policy instruments that governments employ in their attempts to deter asylum-seekers. Policymakers can restrict asylum-seekers’ access to the national territory through immigration control policies, but can also attempt to render their country unappealing by manipulating integration policies (Hammar 1985; Thielemann 2006, 452). Second, we chose attributes that were significant in British public discourse. All the attributes had garnered considerable media and policy attention and were designed to be easily recognizable by respondents. We include the following policy attributes: safe third country provisions,⁵ detention, and deportation (for immigration control policies) and access to legal aid, work, housing, medical care, and cash payments (for integration policies).⁶

We use a forced-choice conjoint experiment to measure specific policy preferences. Conjoint experiments enable researchers to simultaneously estimate the causal effects of multiple treatment components in a single experimental design. Respondents are asked to choose or rate hypothetical profiles (in our case, policy packages) that contain numerous attributes. This has two main advantages in assessing public preferences. First, conjoint experiments “capture decision-making processes in information-rich environments more effectively than do traditional survey experiments” (Hainmueller, Hopkins, and Yamamoto 2014, 27). This means they are especially suited to assessing policy preferences as they enable us to observe tradeoffs in a realistic, multidimensional policy environment. Second, conjoint experiments can mitigate potential social desirability biases (Hainmueller, Hopkins, and Yamamoto 2014) as respondents are less likely to identify sensitive attributes among the range of policies to which they are exposed.

Our data comes from a survey administered online by YouGov to a nationally representative sample of the British adult population. 1,703 respondents each responded to two iterations of the experiment, giving us 3,406 responses. The conjoint experiment was forced-choice and used completely independent randomization with no restrictions on the possible combination of attributes.⁷ After being presented with a definition of an asylum-seeker, respondents were shown two policy packages containing different asylum policies and then asked which policy package they would prefer the British government to implement. Figure 1 shows an example. The dependent variable is which policy package was preferred.

Figure 1.
Example of the policy options given to respondents.

The choice of the reference category is important in conjoint experiments because “AMCEs [average marginal component effects] are defined as relative quantities, requiring that patterns of preferences are expressed against a baseline, reference category for each conjoint feature” (Leeper, Hobolt and Tilley 2020, 211). In most conjoint analyses, the selection of the reference category is somewhat arbitrary, but the reference category here is the current government policy. This provides a clear interpretation as to whether people would favor more restrictive or more permissive policies relative to the status quo. Importantly, respondents were not provided with information about whether policies reflected the current government policy, a hypothetical more restrictive policy, or a hypothetical more permissive policy.

Two criteria were considered in the selection of policy attribute values. First, all policy attribute values were designed to be short and easily comprehensible to avoid satisficing behavior among respondents.⁸ Second, the choice of policy attribute values was guided by their theoretical and policy relevance. The hypothetical policies presented to respondents are thus intended to be realistic, but extreme, policy options.⁹ They do not consistently represent the “most permissive” or the “most restrictive” potential policies but rather plausible policies that already exist in the public debate. Our research design inevitably limits the size of any effects, but it enables a faithful portrayal of current immigration preferences held by the British public within a realistic policy space.

All policy packages contain eight asylum policy attributes which can take three different values: (a) the policy currently pursued by the government, (b) a hypothetical more restrictive policy, and (c) a hypothetical more permissive policy. All the possible values are detailed in online Appendix 1. Consider, for instance, the detention policy attribute values. The first policy value (a) is the current policy, whereby adult asylum-seekers can be detained indefinitely (‘Immigration Detention: Fourteenth Report of Session 2017–19’ 2019). The more restrictive policy value (b) allows for the indefinite detention of both adults and minors. Finally, the more permissive policy value (c) consists of imposing a 1-month limit on immigration detention. This hypothetical policy was chosen because it has been advocated for by many who have called for more permissive policies, such as the Joint Committee on Human Rights (‘Immigration Detention: Sixteenth Report of Session 2017–19’ 2019).

Analysis

Figure 2 shows the average marginal component effect (AMCE) for each policy attribute relative to current government policy. For each attribute, the first value refers to the hypothetical less restrictive policy, the second value refers to the hypothetical more restrictive policy and the third value, the status quo refers to the current government policy. It is fairly clear from Figure 2 that the public is not consistently in favor of more restrictive (or less restrictive) policies.

Figure 2.
The effects of asylum policy options on the probability of accepting the overall policy package.

Deviations from existing government policies — whether toward more stringent or more lenient measures — tend to be unpopular. In other words, any change of policy relative to the status quo often decreases overall profile favorability. This pattern is consistent across several policy areas, including deportation, access to legal aid, access to medical care, and access to cash support. It suggests that people tend to oppose changes to existing asylum policies and show no consistent preference for making them more (or less) restrictive.

This does not, however, mean that all policy options are equally unpopular relative to the current policy. Rather, we observe multidimensionality in people's asylum policy preferences. In some instances, the policy option that is most disliked is the more lenient policy. For example, a policy that is more permissive on deportation leads to a substantial decline in profile favorability: being exposed to a policy package which includes this policy option reduces the likelihood of choosing the package by almost 8 percentage points relative to the current policy. In contrast, policies that impose stricter deportation criteria result in a much smaller, yet significant, reduction in favorability, at approximately 4.5 percentage points.

This trend is reversed when it comes to other policies like access to cash support, where the more restrictive policy option is the least popular. As shown in Figure 2, removing the weekly cash payment to asylum-seekers decreases the likelihood that respondents would support an overall policy package by almost 9 percentage points. Increasing weekly cash payments to £70, however, decreases the likelihood that respondents would support the policy package by only 3 percentage points.

The only policy that conforms to the expectations of the opinion-policy gap hypothesis is access to housing. On the one hand, the less restrictive policy elicits a strong adverse reaction from respondents, reducing overall profile favorability by almost 9 percentage points. On the other hand, the more restrictive policy increases profile favorability by 3 percentage points. This aligns with the assumptions of the opinion-policy gap literature: on housing, people prefer the more restrictive option to the status quo.

The effects that we find are not large for any individual policy as one might expect — and are comparable to those found in a similar experiment (Jeannet, Heidland, and Ruhs 2021) — but when aggregated it is not difficult to make policy packages which are substantially different in popularity. Yet, overall, it is the status quo that is generally the most attractive policy option. Contrary to the expectations of the opinion-policy gap hypothesis, we find no evidence that the British public consistently favors more restrictive asylum policies.

Conclusion

While much is known about public attitudes toward different types of immigrants, there is little empirical work on immigration policy preferences. Despite the widespread notion of an opinion-policy gap in liberal democracies — where public preferences are believed to consistently lean toward more restrictive policies than those that are implemented — there are reasons to be skeptical of such a claim. In this study, we argue that the existing literature has adopted a broad-brush approach when gauging the alignment of immigration policies with public preferences.

We show that the British public is not consistently in favor of enacting more restrictive asylum policies. This is true across a range of immigration control and integration policies. When policy preferences are measured across multiple dimensions in a realistic policy environment, rather than through singular questions about immigration levels or salience, public preferences are revealed to be substantially more complex and multidimensional than the opinion-policy gap hypothesis predicts.

Although the conjoint design we propose has several advantages over existing approaches for measuring the opinion-policy gap, caution is required when designing and interpreting public preferences through conjoint experiments (Abramson, Kocak, and Magazinnik 2022). Importantly, the findings of this study only pertain to asylum policy preferences in the United Kingdom and may not extend to other national contexts or other forms of immigration. It is also worth emphasizing that we are not systematically arguing against the use of singular questions to measure immigration attitudes. There are reasons to believe, for instance, that asking singular generic questions about “immigrants” can be sufficient to make inferences about threat perceptions (Ruedin 2020). In order to capture preferences regarding immigration policies, however, and their congruence with government policy, adopting granular and multidimensional measures offers an important step forward.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-mrx-10.1177_01979183241253502 - Supplemental material for To What Extent Does Asylum Policy Match Public Policy Preferences?

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-mrx-10.1177_01979183241253502 for To What Extent Does Asylum Policy Match Public Policy Preferences? by Tiphaine Le Corre and James Tilley in International Migration Review

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This work was supported by the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford as well as Keble College.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

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