Educational divides and class coalitions: How mainstream party voters divide and unite over immigration issues

ABSTRACT

At the extremes of the transnational cleavage in Western European democracies, voters for far-right and green parties tend to hold polarising immigration attitudes. Yet, the extent to which immigration concerns divide mainstream left and right voters, and drive vote-choice at the ballot box for mainstream parties, is under-researched. In this article, I disentangle both immigration attitudes and mainstream electorates to answer these questions. I show that immigration issues divide electorates within the mainstream left and right along educational lines. Yet, the divide between low-educated and highly-educated voters, in particular regarding their cultural immigration concerns, is larger for the mainstream left. Secondly, turning to the drivers of vote choice, I find that cultural immigration issues explain voting for the mainstream right, particularly for lower educated voters, whereas economic concerns are associated with voting for the mainstream left, despite education level. The paper contributes to ongoing debates about immigration issues and voting by recalibrating the academic focus towards mainstream party electorates and internal divisions therein.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• voting
• Europe
• class
• education

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of the paper profited from the close reading and comments of Nate Breznau, Romana Careja, Jakob Henninger, Philip Manow, Elias Naumann, Friederike Römer and Arndt Wonka. Thanks to the participants of the members of the socio-cultural diversity group at the MPI-MMG, the Political Economy working group 2021 at University of Bremen, the Methods and Design Workshop at UNC Chapel Hill in 2020 and ECPR General Conference 2020 participants for their comments on previous drafts and ideas. All mistakes and omissions are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There are exceptions to this rule of course, such as the Danish Social Democrats among others who have used immigration as a key issue in recent elections.

2 CFA was useful to confirm the divides made in immigration items based on their belonging to economic or cultural dimensions, i.e. labour market issues are theoretically economic, whereas religious issues area cultural.

3 A full list of parties can be found in the online appendix Table OA3.

4 In the online appendix figure OA2, the real (weighted) class compositions of the electorates show that socio-cutlural professionals make up 27% (ML) and 24% (MR), and small employers make up 6% (ML) and 15% (MR). The combined working class (routine and blue collar) make up over 40% of the ML and only 29% of the MR electorate.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation framework programme under the H2020 Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions [grant number 713639].