Attribution and Migration: A Survey Experiment

Abstract Shifting realities in the rules-based order threaten the efficacy of refugee law. State-directed assaults may weaken legal mechanisms, with the consequence that hosting humanitarian migrants could fall disproportionately on voter support for particular waves of asylum seekers. Public opinion may then prove more effective than refugee law at providing safe haven. In such a scenario, it is not merely the economic and integration-related factors that have an oversized impact on public opinion, but also the connection between voters and specific migration-spurring events. This article investigates how blame attribution impacts attitudes towards asylum seekers. Specifically, it assesses people’s attitudes towards migrants fleeing anthropogenic environmental crises and examines if attributing blame to one’s own country for such crises can alter these attitudes. The article uses data from a pre-registered and well-powered survey experiment run on a quota-representative sample of 1527 Dutch respondents. Evidence from the experiment suggests that environmental disasters caused by the Netherlands spur Dutch respondents to favor migrants fleeing that disaster, whereas that effect is not present when an EU entity is responsible. The identified effects are statistically significant but rather small in magnitude. Leveraging these results, the article discusses whether future EU asylum legislation might be guided by attribution, irrespective of whether political currents reduce treaty-based obligations, and finally, proposes several avenues for future research.