Linguistic Proximity and Immigrants’ Exposure to Host Institutions and Society

Immigrants’ exposure to democracy is often measured by years spent under democratic institutions, but meaningful exposure is better captured by behavior at civic interfaces—participation in civic life and interpersonal trust. Using the Integrated Values Surveys (WVS/EVS, 1980–2022), I study whether cultural proximity—proxied by a tree-based measure of native-language relatedness (LPN)—is associated with these behaviors. Across logit and OLS specifications with host-country and survey-year fixed effects, origin-continent fixed effects, and rich controls for demographics, geography, and other pre-determined covariates, higher LPN predicts greater civic participation among first-generation immigrants from the Old World and higher interpersonal trust. In the second-generation— restricting to respondents whose parents share the same origin—parents’ LPN likewise predicts greater civic participation, while the association with interpersonal trust remains positive but is estimated less precisely in the more demanding sensitivity analysis. The civic-participation results are stable across sample restrictions and control sets, whereas the trust results remain positive but are estimated less precisely once potentially endogenous post-migration controls are introduced. Overall, the findings suggest that immigrants do not encounter host-country institutions through residence alone; they encounter them through civic and social interfaces, and inherited cultural proximity helps shape access to those interfaces.