Who is has a ‘better’ reason to flee in the eyes of the public? Previous research has found that, even in context of generally high levels of hostility against refugees, there is some evidence that certain kinds of refugees are preferred by the public, with a clear favoritism towards those that have suffered from distress and violence, percieved as being ‘genuine’ refugees. However, the study of the effect of different ‘push’ factors on attitudes towards migrants remains underdeveloped. The descriptions of the push factors are often abstract, highly politicised labels, such as ‘forced’ or ‘voluntary’ migration, or ‘economic’ migrants or ‘asylum seekers’. We argue that these pre-set categories mask important variation in how the public thinks about causes of fleeing for people on the move.

We propose a novel survey experimental setup fielded in the UK, in which we explore how the public views the relative weight of causes to move away in light of violence, poverty, disaster and climate change from context-specific scenarios. Survey respondents are presented with two vignettes, each presenting a short and realistic scenario of why a person decided to flee, and asked to choose which one they consider having a better reason for fleeing. One feature of this proposed experiment, and in contrast to the more classical conjoint in a tabular form, is our choice to focus on realistic scenarios and individual stories. With a generalised Bradley-Terry model, we estimate the latent degree of ‘good reason’ of each type of story in the British public.