DEMIGSabancı University

Research

Research agenda

DEMIG studies whether anti-immigrant attitudes weaken citizens’ commitment to democracy or produce selective support for particular democratic principles.

Research questions

Questions guiding the project

  1. How do anti-immigrant attitudes affect citizens’ attachment to liberal democracy over time?
  2. Do exclusionary attitudes reduce support for democracy overall, or weaken particular dimensions such as minority rights and political equality?
  3. How do different forms of immigration, immigrant profiles, and economic or cultural sources of opposition produce different democratic preferences?
  4. How do migration flows, policy shifts, economic downturns, elections, political crises, and other external changes reshape these attitudes?
  5. Can AI-assisted survey-question development measure complex and sensitive attitudes more clearly while reducing social-desirability and researcher-introduced bias?

Analytical focus

What the project compares

DEMIG does not treat support for democracy or attitudes toward immigration as single, fixed positions. The research design separates their main dimensions and follows how they relate to one another.

Democratic attachment

The project treats democratic support as multidimensional. It examines general support for democracy alongside commitment to liberal-democratic protections, minority rights, equality, and majoritarian understandings of democracy.

Variation in immigration attitudes

DEMIG distinguishes between forms of immigration, immigrant profiles, policy choices, and the economic or cultural reasons people give for opposing immigration.

Change over time

Repeated surveys and panel research examine whether democratic and immigration attitudes change alongside elections, migration flows, policy shifts, economic conditions, and political crises.

Methodological work

Survey measurement

One part of DEMIG evaluates whether AI-assisted development can improve survey questions about complex and sensitive political attitudes.

The project assesses clarity, neutrality, inclusiveness, sensitivity, and contextual fit. AI-assisted questions are compared with conventionally developed questions through survey experiments. Improvement is treated as an empirical question rather than an assumption.

Read about the method

Expected contribution

Connecting migration attitudes and democratic attachment

DEMIG brings together research on public attitudes toward immigration and research on citizens’ attachment to democracy. Comparative and experimental evidence will be used to examine the dimensions, development, and causal mechanisms of this relationship.

The project aims to improve how scholars conceptualize and measure democratic commitment, particularly when support for democratic institutions coexists with opposition to equal rights or inclusion.