Moving towards a more tolerant society? Attitudes towards immigrants in French politics

Attitudes towards immigrants have played a major role in French politics in the last 50 years. Understanding how these attitudes are structured and what makes people become more tolerant or intolerant of immigrants appears therefore essential. In the literature, five hypotheses have been tested: the interest hypothesis, the cognitive hypothesis, the authoritarian attitudinal system hypothesis, the contact hypothesis and the contextual hypothesis. Recent studies have emphasized the importance of context. This article revisits these hypotheses using the French European Values Study data sets. Our results confirm the increase in tolerance of immigrants over the last 20 years. Disentangling the attitudinal system to which these opinions belong allows us to claim that this growth of tolerance is, at least partly, an effect of the individualization of society.