Civic Fairness and the Evaluation of Individual Immigrants
A conjoint experiment on civic fairness in immigration judgments, fielded in the United States, Germany, South Korea, and Singapore
Description
This registration covers a conjoint experiment on civic fairness in immigration judgments, fielded as part of a four-country survey study on immigration attitudes. Respondents evaluate individual immigrant profiles and decide whether to support permanent residence. The registration specifies three confirmatory hypotheses on civic fairness: main effects of legal compliance, functional integration, and humanitarian need (H1); the relative weight of fairness versus group cues (H2); and a fairness-schema signature distinguishing legal status from ascriptive group penalties (H2b). Approximately 2,500 respondents are recruited per country, quota-matched to national census margins, roughly 10,000 in total.
Study design
This is a within-subject conjoint experiment in which each respondent evaluates one immigrant profile at a time. Each profile is built from nine attributes, with the level of each attribute randomly assigned: mode of entry, language ability, employment status, special circumstances, occupation, country of origin, religion, age, and gender. Respondents complete 10 randomized tasks, followed by an 11th task that exactly repeats the first to measure test-retest reliability. For each profile, respondents decide whether they support or oppose granting permanent residence and answer four questions about fairness, covering equality, need, investment, and fitting in.
Country of origin and religion vary by country to compare culturally closer, majority-religion backgrounds with conflict-affected, minority-religion backgrounds. Respondents are recruited from online panels administered through Qualtrics with international survey vendors, quota-matched to national census margins. This experiment is fielded in one instrument alongside a separate, independently pre-registered experiment on procedural legitimacy in immigration governance, with presentation order randomized between subjects.
Hypotheses
H1. Fairness-related characteristics increase support. Legal compliance, functional integration, and humanitarian need are expected to increase support, along with matching effects on the corresponding fairness measures.
H2. Fairness matters more than group cues. This compares the effect of authorized versus unauthorized entry with the effect of culturally proximate versus conflict-affected origin.
H2b. Legal compliance reduces the importance of group cues. Differences based on origin and religion are expected to be smaller when entry is authorized than when it is unauthorized.
Analysis plan
H1 is tested with AMCEs from a regression of the binary support decision on the randomized profile attributes, estimated per country with cluster-robust standard errors by respondent, plus parallel item-level regressions of the four fairness-battery items. H2 is tested as the signed gap between the fairness gap and the group gap in marginal means of support. H2b is tested as a two-cue intersection-union test on the origin and religion differences, pooled across countries. One pre-specified sensitivity analysis reruns the full pipeline on the subset of respondents not flagged by a composite automation indicator.