Between Human Dignity and Security: Identifying Citizen and Elite Preferences and Concerns over Refugee Reception

Under what conditions do citizens and elites support the creation of migrant and refugee hosting facilities in their area, and what types of facilities do they prefer? What types of concerns underlay these preferences and how do they differ by ideology and elite status? This paper examines these questions in the case of Greece—a country heavily impacted by the 2015 refugee crisis—using a nationally representative survey of 5,916 Greek citizens and a complementary survey of Greek elites. We first use a conjoint experiment to elicit preferences regarding refugee reception policies and then conduct text analysis to examine how citizens and elites frame their “expressions of concern” when asked to qualitatively describe the conditions under which they would be willing to accept an asylum-seeker hosting facility in their municipality. Our results show that there is not only aggregate popular and elite support for the “securitization” of asylum seeker resettlement facilities, but also critical axes of polarization regarding the importance of asylumseekers’ human dignity and the extent to which migration is considered a security issue. These axes of polarization are more pronounced among citizens than elites.