Anti-Immigrant Sentiment and Opposition to Democracy in Europe

Abstract

Years of declining support for democracy and the election of leaders with authoritarian characteristics in liberal-democracies continues to trouble scholars. Current narratives may understate the importance of nativist beliefs in these developments by treating this as a byproduct of broader political movements. I contribute to the understanding of nativism’s role in democratic beliefs by arguing for isolating nativism from broader political movements when studying its consequences. Even when controlling for populism, far-right political affiliation, and important national-level variables, anti-immigrant sentiment is significantly associated with increased illiberal-democratic political preferences and decreased evaluations of the importance of living in a democracy.

Keywords:

• Democracy
• nativism
• Europe
• illiberalism
• social change

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the guidance in this research during its dissertation stage provided by Paul D. Froese, Charles M. North, Christopher Pieper, Jerry Z. Park, and Charles Tolbert. I am also grateful for the methodological input offered by Matthew Andersson and Xiuhua Wang and early guidance from Matthew Henderson.

Notes

1 While liberal-democracies can withstand the liberal-democratic freedom of criticizing being applied to itself, freely embraced resistance to authoritarianism is also needed (Popper and Gombrich, 1994).

2 Watts and Feldman’s (2001) conclusion is frequently cited in this study, and the authors utilize a similar measure. This provides a useful point of comparison.

3 Estimated empty models confirm that liberal-democracy scores and attitudes toward democracy vary across the nation (Wang et al., 2012).

4 With multiple imputations not substantively altering results, the original models are shown. Unsurprisingly, the single largest contributor to missing data was income. As a robustness test, I also ran supplementary models utilizing a system of dichotomous comprised of the decile groups and missing respondents referenced to the highest income group. The results and the narrative of the study remained substantively similar. Therefore, the original results are presented.

Additional information

Funding

The author declares no external funding or conflicts of interests.