The seeds of ideology: Historical immigration and political preferences in the United States

Paola Giuliano of UCLA Anderson School of Management and her co-author study the long run effects of immigration on US political ideology.  They establish a new result:  historical European immigration is associated with stronger preferences for redistribution and a more liberal ideology among Americans today.  They hypothesize that European immigrants moving to the US in the early twentieth century brought with them their preferences for redistribution, with long-lasting effects on political attitudes of US-born individuals.  After documenting that immigrants’ economic characteristics and other standard economic forces cannot, alone, explain their results, they provide evidence that the findings are driven by immigrants with a longer exposure to social-welfare reforms in their countries of origin. In this Quantitative History Webinar, Paola Giuliano will present their findings. Consistent with a process of horizontal transmission from immigrants to natives, results are stronger where historical inter-group contact was more frequent, and are not due to transmission within ancestry groups. Immigration left its footprint on American political ideology starting with the New Deal, and persisted since then.

Paola's co-author: Marco Tabellini (Harvard Business School)

Live on Zoom on August 26, 2021
10:00 Hong Kong/Beijing/Singapore
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