Suchergebnisse

The COVID-19 pandemic has a profound impact on the everyday lives of people around the world. This includes economic issues, social isolation and anxieties directly related to the coronavirus. Some of these phenomena relate to social disintegration, which in turn has been linked to negative outgroup sentiments. However, the tenuous connection between pandemic developments and international migration processes calls into question whether a link between pandemic concomitants and immigration-related attitudes exists empirically. Arguments based on political cues and media effects even suggest that the widespread focus on the COVID-19 pandemic suppresses the issue salience of immigration and negative immigration sentiments. To test these propositions, we employ data from a newly collected cross-sectional study carried out in November and December 2020 in 11 European countries. We distinguish between general migration-related threats and blaming the pandemic on immigration as outcome variables. The results suggest that pandemic-related concerns increase both threat perceptions and perceptions that immigration is driving the pandemic, but more clearly so for the latter. On the macro level, we find that where the pandemic is more severe, respondents are less likely to blame immigrants. This suggests that a country-level suppression of salience of immigration is indeed taking place.

Abstract
This study explores the implications of early between-school tracking within educational systems – a practice that involves sorting students into different educational pathways based on their achievement levels. We examine two potential effects of this process: (i) the promotion of homogeneous learning environments through tracking, and (ii) the potential for tracking to exacerbate social segregation among schools. To scrutinize these effects, we analyze data from the assessment studies PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS (1995–2019). Additionally, we investigate whether school selectivity influences the tracking effects. Using difference-in-differences models combined with multiverse analyses, our findings demonstrate that early between-school tracking indeed contributes to the homogeneity of learning environments and can lead to increased social school segregation. However, our results do not indicate a moderating role of school selectivity.