Engaging Immigrants? Examining the Correlates of Electoral Participation among Voters with Migration Backgrounds

Abstract

An increasing number of eligible citizens in North America and Europe were born outside of these countries. As remarked by Heath et al. [2011. “Ethnic Heterogeneity in the Social Bases of Voting at the 2010 British General Election.” Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties 21 (2): 255–277], in the case that voters with migration background respond differently to established correlates of turnout, understanding the role of immigration-specific factors becomes particularly important. On the basis of individual-level register data from the 2012 Finnish municipal elections (n = 585,839), we examine whether the effect of socioeconomic status on turnout differs according to citizenship status and test which indicators of social and political integration boost participation among foreign-born voters. We find, in line with the different response model, that the impact of age and education is weaker among voters with migration background. In addition, having a native spouse and minor children, past eligibility and being born in a democratic country increase turnout among foreign-born voters, lending support for the assimilation, exposure and transferability models. Finally, the findings concerning the resistance model were opposite to our expectations. Older age at the time of immigration increases participation, but only among migrants born in a democratic country.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Petri Palmu and three anonymous reviewers and the editor of JEPOP for their valuable comments and suggestions. They also appreciate the thorough work by senior actuaries Tuukka Saranpää and Satu Heinonen from Statistic Finland in the data production.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at doi: 10.1080/17457289.2015.1023203.

Notes

1. This article makes reference to supplementary material available on the publisher's website at http://dx%2010.1080/17457289.2015.1023203

2. Studies that report turnout differences among native and foreign-born voters include Bäck and Soininen (1998), Fennema and Tillie (1999), Togeby (1999), Aalandslid (2008), Bhatti and Hansen (2010, 2014), Ahokas, Weide, and Wilhelmsson (2011), Bevelander and Pendakur (2011), González-Ferrer (2011), Heath et al. (2011), Wüst et al. (2011) and Sanders, Fisher, Heath, and Sobolewska (2014).

3. Furthermore, the majority of private schools licensed to give a basic education in Finland are not specially oriented towards ethnic minorities. There are, for example, only two Russian–Finnish comprehensive schools in the entire country. Also religious schools are very few, most of them being Christian (Ministry of Education and Culture 2014).

4. The pilot for the use of electronic voter registers was launched in the parliamentary elections of 2011. It is voluntary for the municipal authorities to start using the electronic register on the polling day. Municipalities can also decide in which electoral wards the electronic register will be applied. In the 2012 municipal elections, an electronic register was used in 211 out of 265 electoral wards. Even in these electoral wards, voting still takes place using paper ballots.

5. As Finnish citizenship is granted to a child of a Finnish citizen irrespective of the place of birth, this group may include some who are not naturalized foreigners but who were considered “expatriate Finns” at birth and who later moved to the country of their parents’ origin. Excluding Sweden-born Finnish citizens, however, significantly reduces the number of such cases.

6. This group also includes individuals who were born in Finland as foreign citizens (i.e. born to parents who were foreign citizens) and were naturalized by the time of the elections. They might be called the “second-generation Finns”. As migration of foreign citizens to Finland significantly increased only at the beginning of 1990s, the second generation that has reached the voting age is still rather small. The effect of parental example may be different for them than for young voters with native Finnish parents, but the second generation can be considered similar to native-born Finns in terms of political socialization.

7. As a robustness test, we also ran each analysis including voters born in Sweden and Swedish citizens. The results remain practically the same. These analyses are available from the authors upon request.

8. Due to ethical reasons, the database released from Statistics Finland included information about country of origin only for four largest migration groups, namely Swedish, Russian, Estonians and Somalis. The democracy variable had thus to be computed by Statistics Finland.

9. For immigrants who were born in Yemen, Vietnam and Germany, Statistics Finland does not distinguish those who came from the North and the South part (Yemen and Vietnam) or from the East and West part (Germany). Voters who were born in one of the two regions of these countries were coded with a valid value for our level of democracy variable only if they were born in a year where the two regions had identical scores on the Freedom House index.

10. Available at http://dx%2010.1080/17457289.2015.1023203

11. In order to facilitate the interpretation of the results presented in logistic regression models (Table 1), we have also calculated the estimated turnout probabilities. These are available from the authors upon request.

12. We also tested the effect of another potential indicator of structural assimilation, namely employment status. Surprisingly, among foreign-born voters those being unemployed are almost as likely to vote as those who are employed or not part of the labor force. This is particularly noteworthy given the noticeable gap in turnout between the unemployed and employed among native citizens (48% vs. 58%) and the previous finding concerning the mobilizing effect of employment among naturalized citizens (González-Ferrer 2011, 77–78). The results are available from the authors upon request.

13. Since there is collinearity between eligibility in previous municipal elections and age at the time of immigration, their interactions with the level of democracy in the country of origin had to be tested in two separate models.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland under grant no. 273433. Also Ministry of Justice and The Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki contributed to data costs.