Public opinion towards immigration (national)

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One of the most salient issues across Europe, particularly since the 1980s, has been immigration. Some would even argue it is one of the more defining features of the contemporary political scene in most liberal democracies, both for actors on the political demand and the political supply. Many studies have analysed and continue to analyse the overall state and the evolution of people’s perceptions and the general public opinion towards immigration (POIM). Yet, they are often limited in their scope, the period they cover or they rely on a limited number of survey items.

Our project sets out to provide an encompassing and comprehensive measure of public opinion towards immigration. For the moment, the corresponding data set contains annual time series measures of public opinion towards immigration for 17 European democracies, namely Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and Sweden. These measures are based on data from dozens of international and national surveys, comprising hundreds of different variables drawn from thousands of survey margins.

Rather than individual country files, the data is released as a harmonised time-series coss-sectional data set.

[Download data collection guidelindes (PDF)]

[Download data analytics report (PDF)]

[Download immigration data (.csv)]

[Download immigration data (.dta)]

The data is part of a larger data set (see Public Opinion). Please cite as follows:

Van Hauwaert, S. M. (2018). Global Public Opinions Project (GPOP): Comparative public opinions dataset, version 1.1. Available for download at