YOUTH 2020 - The position of young people in Slovenia

64 Here, we are comparing youth shares agreeing with the statement that employers should be favourably disposed to giving jobs to the native-born population instead of immigrants. From Figure 1.15 we can glean signifi- cant differences between the selected countries. As before, Hungary and Germany are the furthest apart. Almost all young Hungarians (90%) thinks employers should be favourably disposed to the natively born. In Germany, only 34% think the same. Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, and Italy are somewhere between these two extremes. Second, the differences are stable across time. A cosmopolitan youth outlook has been dominating in Germany since themid-nineties. The reverse is true for Hungary. In Slove- nia, the share of young people agreeing with the statement has been con- sistently hovering between 80% and 60% since the nineties. However, third, we can observe a persistent negative trend that has been going on in Slovenia for the past 12 years. Today, more than 40% of young Slovenes have a more cosmopolitan outlook. This is comparable to the Italian and Austrian case in 2008–2009. Once again, we suspect that economic de- velopment is an important driver of increasing cosmopolitanism in Slove- nia, eclipsing as it does the importance of survival values and highlight- ing self-expression values (Inglehart and Welzel, 2005). The economic recession of 2008–2009 temporarily, and expectedly (Hainmueller and Hopkisn, 2014), paused the process but did not stop or reverse it. The topic of immigration is very much related to how young people per- ceive ethnic and other minorities. In our complete sample, the share of those fully agreeing with the statement that the government should do more for national and ethnic minorities stands at 10.5%, while a further 30.7% somewhat agree. Taking these two groups together, we can say that 41.2% of respondents support the statement, while those either fully or partially disagreeing represent a much smaller share (22.1%). Unsurprisingly, the youth subgroup expressing a higher affinity to refugees moving in is also more likely to agree with the aforementioned statement (r = 0.28; p < 0.01). The same goes for those more inclined towards the Romamoving in (r = 0.26; p < 0.01), as well as those opining that immigra- tion in general is a positive development for Slovenia (r = 0.25; p < 0.01). We are led to conclude that all of this is part of a broader dimension of a