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Legalization of undocumented migrants or fixed-term bilateral agreements with sending
countries: What do the Greeks prefer?
Nicholas Sambanis (Yale) & Eleni Kyrkopoulou (Yale)
In September 2023, Dimitris Keridis, who had been recently appointed Minister of Migration and Asylum in
Greece, revealed the government’s plans to regularize thousands of undocumented migrants so as to address
labor market shortages in agriculture, tourism, and construction. The legalization policy was presented as a realistic, hard-nosed way of maximizing the economic benefits of immigration while ebbing the flow of new migrants, Opposition to the policy was registered by the more conservative segments of the governing party. We provide new data to assess Greek public opinion on this important debate regarding immigration policy.
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Are Greeks ‘really’ in favor of a hawkish stance vis-à-vis Turkey?
Nicholas Sambanis (Yale) & Panayotis Tsakonas (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)
In 2022-23, many believed that a militarized dispute between Greece and Turkey was likely due to unresolved rival claims of rights to natural resource exploration in the Eastern Mediterranean. Conflicts over national sovereignty are perceived as threats to the national identity and that perception easily foments nationalist competition which could push public opinion to support hawkish responses to foreign policy threats.  In a recent study, we test whether the Greek public’s foreign policy preferences are driven in part by misperceptions of how other Greeks’ prefer to handle threats to national sovereignty.  We present experimental interventions that shed new light on mechanisms of nationalist conflict escalation in Greece, highlighting the role of misperceptions of how one should respond to national identity threat.