Introduction and Contribution:

Most people move for economic or personal reasons, such as attending college, starting a new job, or being closer to family. Accordingly, residential moves are often beneficial for movers: they can improve life satisfaction, offer movers new economic opportunities, and increase long-term earnings. However, what is often little acknowledged is that moving can generate significant political costs: movers may have to learn about the political issues salient in their new place of residence while simultaneously facing the daunting task of settling into a new place of residence. It is because of these challenges that moving can change the extent to which someone engages in politics.

In “The local costs of moving,” Hans Lueders proposes that to understand how moving affects political engagement, we need to distinguish between national and local engagement. Studying political engagement among movers in Germany, he finds that German movers remain similarly engaged in national politics but become considerably less engaged in local politics. Lueders argues that national engagement is unlikely to change much after a move because the political context remains the same. Intuitively, the same political candidates run for national office no matter where one lives, and the country’s most pressing political issues remain the same as well. By contrast, the political context changes significantly when it comes to local engagement: living in a new place means that movers have less political knowledge (e.g., of local political candidates or salient issues), limited social networks to facilitate local engagement, and a weaker sense of civic duty to engage. Lueders finds no evidence that movers adopt new norms or political ideas — mainly because Germans tend to move to places that are socially and politically similar.

Lueders draws our attention to how moving — and the disengagement it generates — can undermine local democratic accountability. Indeed, when movers cannot communicate their preferences to local leaders, what follows is “representational inequality” between movers and “stayers.” That domestic migration can add or remove 5-10% of a county’s population over a decade, thus has serious consequences for the quality of democracy.

Importantly, Lueders broadens the geographic scope of research on political engagement. Social science research on moving has been heavily informed by data from the US, where “strict voter registration requirements…have been described as more costly than the act of voting itself.” Indeed, the US’s unique — and uniquely burdensome — voting regime has been shown to weaken both local and national engagement for movers. Lueders’s research suggests that these findings do not travel beyond the US. In Germany and much of the Western democratic world, movers are legally required to register their new address with local authorities, and are then automatically added to the electoral rolls. This removes a key barrier to political engagement, at least at the national level. American readers may rightfully ask which interests are advanced or undermined by the current status quo.

Engagement Before and After Moving:

Lueders introduces two competing accounts of how moving affects political engagement. On the first account, moving imposes serious epistemological and social costs: movers must learn new information about politics, form new social networks, and come to see themselves as members of a new community. Not only does all of this take time, but movers usually prioritize more urgent personal matters — e.g., finding housing or childcare — such that politics takes a back seat. 

Weakened social ties mean that movers interact less often with people who could inform them about local issues, candidates, or initiatives — which are hard enough for longtime residents to grasp. Members of social networks also enforce norms of participation on each other; movers who lack social ties will thus be more content to abstain from voting or volunteering for campaigns. It could be inferred from this account that the further away one moves, the less engaged one will be with one's new home: candidates and issues seem even more novel, while social networks become even more fractured.

A second account highlights how the context of a new place can change engagement, as movers are exposed to new political ideas or norms around participation. This may be because movers are persuaded to approach politics differently, or for more instrumental reasons (e.g., if one’s preferred party already wins by large margins in the new place, engagement will seem less pressing). The contextual account assumes that moving entails a big change in one’s political environment.

Methods and Findings:

Lueders uses German household panel data collected between 1984 and 2020, which totals over 500,000 “respondent-year observations.” By comparing how engagement varies over time between movers and stayers, he can home in on the changes in engagement caused by moving itself, accounting for any baseline differences caused by the kinds of people who choose to move or stay. National engagement is measured by self-reported levels of national political interest, whether respondents voted in the last national election, and whether they plan to vote in the upcoming one. Local engagement is measured by self-reported attachments to one’s place of residence, how frequently they participate in local political and citizen initiatives, and their frequency of volunteering in local associations and organizations. 

Lueders’ findings are consistent with the first account, in which local engagement declines due to lower-quality information and weaker social ties. He finds no evidence that Germans’ levels of national engagement change, regardless of the distance of one’s move.

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Figure 2. Changes in engagement around moves of varying distances. This figure explores whether movers’ engagement in national (top panel) and local engagement (bottom panel) changes around moves of varying distance. Each coefficient reflects the estimated change in engagement among movers compared to the baseline (all stayers plus movers six or more years before a move). Vertical bars are 95% confidence intervals. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (Goebel et al., 2019).
 

By contrast, the V-shaped patterns in the lower panel show that local engagement changes significantly, declining in the lead-up (around five years) before a move, reaching its lowest point in the year of a move, and then slowly returning to pre-move levels in subsequent years, but without fully recovering. Importantly, engagement declines with distance, as the most local moves (i.e., within the same town or county) leave engagement largely unchanged.
 

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Figure 1. Changes in engagement before and after a move. This figure explores whether movers’ engagement in national (top panel) and local engagement (bottom panel) changes around a move. Each coefficient reflects the extent to which movers depart from the overall trend in engagement in a particular year before or after their move. Vertical bars are 95% confidence intervals. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (Goebel et al., 2019).
 

Against the “contextual” account, Lueders finds that the majority of German moves occur over short distances, which makes it unlikely that contexts differ dramatically. And indeed, most of the places to which Germans move are sociopolitically similar (to where they left) in terms of levels of turnout and federal election outcomes.
 

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Figure 3. Most moves occur over short distances. This figure uses data on all cross-county moves in Germany in 2015 to compute various metrics of the distance of such moves. Left panel: distribution of the distance between origin and destination counties. Center panel: share of all moves from a particular county that go to neighboring counties. Right panel: share of all moves from a particular county that lead movers to other counties in the same state. Own calculations using data from FDZ der Statistischen Amter des Bundes und der Lander (2019). The vertical dashed line indicates the median move (left) or median county (center and right).

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Figure 4. Movers tend to move between politically similar environments. This figure reports the distribution of the change in environments that movers experience upon a move (dark blue). This distribution is contrasted with the distribution of change in environments one would expect when simply considering population totals between county pairs (grey). The vertical lines indicate the medians for the actual (dashed line) and benchmark (dotted line) distributions, respectively.
 

Ultimately, “The local costs of moving” underscores how highly individual life events can undermine the quality of collective governance.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer

Japan is confronting an intensifying national debate over outsiders, including tourists, immigrants, and foreign workers, fueled by concerns about social cohesion, national identity, and economic stagnation. A three-wave panel survey of the Stanford Japan Barometer (SJB), fielded around the February 8, 2026, Japanese general election, reveals that Japanese public opinion on immigration is highly conditional on the attributes of immigrants considered for admission and the framing of the immigration debate.

The findings show a strong preference for high-skilled, Japanese-speaking professionals and suggest that framing immigration as an economic benefit can boost public support, while invoking security and cultural rhetoric has the opposite effect.

SJB is a large-scale, multi-wave public opinion survey on political, economic, and social issues in Japan. A project of the Japan Program at Stanford University’s Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), SJB is led by Stanford sociologist Kiyoteru Tsutsui, the director of APARC and the Japan Program, and political scientist Charles Crabtree. 

To identify what drives public attitudes toward potential immigrants and the arguments that resonate or backfire in the public debate over immigration, SJB conducted a series of experiments across a three-wave panel: before the 2026 Japanese general election, a week after the election, and a month after the election.

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An Experiment in Preferences

Using conjoint experiments, the survey presented respondents with pairs of hypothetical profiles of potential immigrants and asked them to choose which one they preferred for admission to Japan. Each immigrant profile varied randomly across nine attributes: country of origin, reason for application, prior visits to Japan, occupation, work experience, employment plan, sex, Japanese language ability, and education. By analyzing thousands of these choices, the researchers can precisely measure how much each attribute drives public preference.

Key Finding 1: Strong Preference for Highly Skilled, Japanese-Speaking Applicants

The findings reveal that occupation and language skills rank top of mind in determining public attitudes toward potential immigrants. Respondents overwhelmingly favor high-skilled professionals – physicians, IT engineers, and research scientists – over care workers, construction laborers, cleaners, and convenience store clerks.

Japanese language ability proved to be another critical gateway. Fluency in Japanese was one of the single most powerful positive traits an applicant could have, suggesting that language integration is a cornerstone of public acceptance.

Key Finding 2: Clear Preference for Western Applicants

Respondents strongly favor immigrants from Germany and the United States (around 55%), with Vietnam, India, Turkey, and Brazil close behind (51–53%). South Korean applicants fall slightly below average (48%).

Applicants from China, however, are chosen only 37-39% of the time, a dramatically lower percentage than every other origin country tested. This gap persists even when controlling for occupation, education, and language ability. Thus, for Chinese applicants, Japanese language fluency provides a much smaller boost than for applicants from other countries. These findings suggest the resistance to Chinese immigrants stems from geopolitical concerns rather than doubts about skills or integration.

The February 8, 2026, election and the subsequent government formation do not appear to have meaningfully shifted the conjoint-measured immigration preferences by occupation, language ability, and national origin.

The Power of Framing

In a companion experiment, the researchers tested how framing influences the Japanese public’s opinion on immigration. Participants were randomly assigned to read a short article framing immigration as an economic benefit, a cultural challenge, a security concern, or using no framing at all. They were then asked to answer a question about their views.

Key Finding 3: Economic Framing Opens Minds; Cultural and Security Fears Close Them

The way immigration is discussed matters immensely. The results show that positive economic framing significantly increases support for immigration, but positive cultural and security framings had no such statistically significant effect in any wave. By contrast, fear appears to be a powerful motivator, as negative framing of immigration reduces public support, with security-negative framing showing the largest and most consistent effect observed. 

Furthermore, the February 8, 2026, election and the subsequent government formation appear to have had a meaningful impact on immigration preference by framing. The impact of negative framings has become measurably larger one month after the election, suggesting that the Japanese public may be more responsive to anti-immigration rhetoric.

"The election — and the subsequent government formation — does not appear to have meaningfully shifted conjoint-measured immigration preferences," the researchers write on the SJB website. "The framing experiment tells a somewhat different story, however: while the direction of all effects is consistent, negative framings have become numerically larger in the third sub-wave, suggesting that one month after the election, the Japanese public may be more responsive to anti-immigration rhetoric."

Immigration Becomes Key Issue in Japan’s Gubernatorial Races

In a March 2, 2026, report on the prominence of the "foreigner problem" in Japan's gubernatorial races, the Asahi Shimbun cited the latest data from SJB.

The Asahi Shimbun reporter, Mari Fujisaki, writes:

“Data also shows heightened election interest in ‘foreigner issues.’ The Japan Barometer – a Stanford University Japan Program online survey of thousands on Japanese society and politics – presented over 10 policy options in November 2022, April 2023, and February 2026 (twice), asking respondents to rate their level of support or opposition. Regarding one policy, ‘accepting foreign workers,’ opposition stood at 35.5% and 36.6% in 2022 and 2023, respectively. By contrast, in the two surveys conducted in February 2026, opposition rose to 53.1% and 53.4%, marking an increase of approximately 17 percentage points between 2022 and 2026. For most other items, opposition rates either decreased or remained unchanged, with increases limited to a few percentage points at most.”

You can view a PDF version of the article. The online version and further reporting by the Asahi Shimbun on the SJB’s latest survey findings are forthcoming. 

SJB has published findings on Japanese public opinions on issues ranging from national security policy and the Taiwan contingency to same-sex marriage, marital surname choices, and women's leadership. Learn more  >