When do social democratic parties unite over tough immigration policy?

Abstract

Attempting to reconcile the diverse immigration policy demands of the ‘old’ working class and the ‘new’ middle class, social democratic parties struggle to take a clear position on immigration policy. Adopting more restrictive policies is a possible way forward, but this is likely to lead to electorally costly intra-party conflict. This article illuminates the conditions under which social democratic parties can unite behind more restrictive immigration policies and promote them consistently. Employing a most-similar systems design, it presents a comparative case study of the Austrian and Danish social democrats, from the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ to 2020. The article argues that low levels of territorial decentralisation enabled the Danish social democrats to promote a restrictive stance on immigration top-down, while the Austrian social democrats’ federal party structure exacerbated internal disagreements between urban and rural leaders. These findings highlight the importance of internal party characteristics in explaining how parties respond to strategic trade-offs.

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1975211 .

Keywords:

• Social democracy
• immigration policy
• political parties
• meso-level
• party organisation

Acknowledgements

We thank three anonymous reviewers as well as one of the editors of West European Politics, Wolfgang C. Müller, for their helpful and constructive comments. Moritz Brantz offered invaluable research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Although the left–right distinction traditionally refers to the socio-economic dimension of political conflict, we follow here the now-dominant understanding that a ‘rightward shift’ can mean the adoption of authoritarian and restrictive positions on the socio-cultural dimension (Häusermann and Kriesi 2015).

2 The data cited in Kosiara-Pedersen (2017) has been collected prior to the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’. Since no newer data is available, we need to take this a proxy. However, it would be implausible to assume that the ‘refugee crisis’ could have led a membership that generally prefers restrictive immigration policies to adopt more liberal views.

3 The SPÖ sent the survey only to those 40.000 members who had given their e-mail address to the party, which effectively excluded the remaining 160.000 members from the survey. Of those 40.000 members with registered e-mail addresses, 11.000 participated in the survey, which amounts to a response rate of 27.5 percent. The overall low turnout of 5.6 percent must be seen against the background of Austria’s legacy of clientelism and party patronage, which produced unusually high party membership rates with many passive members.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the German Research Foundation (grant number 392405337, Philip Rathgeb) and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (grant number 016.Veni.185.084, Fabio Wolkenstein).

Notes on contributors

Philip Rathgeb

Philip Rathgeb is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Social Policy in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh and an Associated Fellow in the Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz. His work falls in the area of comparative political economy, with a particular focus on welfare states, labour relations, party politics and social inequality. His book Strong Governments, Precarious Workers was published with Cornell University Press and he has written articles for the Socio-economic Review, the Journal of European Public Policy, West European Politics and Comparative European Politics, amongst others. [[email protected]]

Fabio Wolkenstein

Fabio Wolkenstein is Associate Professor in Political Science at Aarhus University, and Adjunct Researcher in Political Theory at the University of Amsterdam. His primary field of research is democratic theory, with a special interest in political parties, representation and political ideologies. His book Rethinking Party Reform was published with Oxford University Press. [[email protected]]