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ABSTRACT
Integration of immigrants into the labor market is a sizeable policy concern for developed democracies. This article argues that government type influences immigrants’ labor market outcomes. Since immigrant integration constitutes a multidimensional policy space, differences in party preferences and the dynamics of intragovernmental and legislative bargaining make it hard for coalition and minority governments to implement effective labor market integration policies. Consequently, single-party majority governments are better able to foster the labor market integration of immigrants. Fixed-effects estimations in a panel of OECD countries provide evidence in favor of this argument. A single-party majority government reduces the employment gap between the foreign and the native-born population with several percentage points.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Martin Vinæs Larsen, Malte Rokkjær Dahl, Wiebke Junk, Benjamin C. K. Egerod, two anonymous reviewers, the editors of European Journal of Public Policy as well as workshop participants at the University of Copenhagen for helpful suggestions and advice. All errors are my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 This is not to devaluate the importance of other types of integration challenges both economic, social and political. However, focusing on the gap in national labor markets has the advantage that it is very visible and policy-relevant integration issue which can be transparently measured and compared across countries over time.
2 See Boeri (Citation2010) cited in Burgoon (Citation2014).
3 See reviews mentioned in Foged and Peri (Citation2016: 1).
4 See Hainmueller and Hopkins (Citation2014) for a review.
5 Immigration and integration policies are often implemented in tandem, and thus issues within one of these areas spill over into the other. However, this article still argues that even given a specific immigration policy, integration policies still independently matter for immigrant labor market integration.
6 See Alt and Iversen (Citation2017: 229).
7 Due to the inherent relationship between the immigration and integration area, the ideological dimensions of the immigration area might also spill over into the integration area, even though the specific policies within these two policy areas can be very different. For example, requirements for family reunification (immigration) and national programs for language training (integration), even though both might relate to the ideological dimension of national identity.
8 A potential exception in a recent paper by Lutz (Citation2019), who however only looks at official integration policy and whether it is closer to a restrictive-assimilationist model or a liberal-multicultural model and not immigrant labor market outcomes.
9 Confer Butschek and Walter (Citation2014) for a meta-analysis of the effects of active labor market programs, including wage subsidies, on immigrant employment.
10 See Martin and Vanberg (Citation2014) for evidence on how final enacted policies reflect inter-coalitional compromises in coalition governments.
11 See Rosholm and Vejlin (Citation2010) for research on the effects of immigrant transfer cuts.
12 The frustrated efforts of the Danish center-right minority government to find legislative support for its immigration and integration policies, could be contrasted with the experience of another OECD center-right government, the (from 2011) single-party majority Canadian Harper government, which was able to push through substantial changes to the Canadian immigration and integration policies (Omidvar Citation2016). The years following the Harper government's change to a single-party majority government in 2011 saw declines in the labor market gap between the native and foreign born Canadian population.
13 Lindvall (Citation2017) argues that the dispersion of political power can sometimes increase reform capacity since they provide the ability to compensate losers from reforms. However, since, as argued, the integration and immigration policy areas are multidimensional in nature and concern many policy dimensions, such as anti-discrimination and national identity, which are not strictly economic in nature and provide little ability for loser compensation, this line of argumentation is less likely to hold within the integration policy area.
14 Research using a veto actor framework often measure distance between parties on the traditional left-right scale but as argued above integration and immigration policy might divide political parties on other policy dimensions even though these parties are close to each on the traditional left-right scale.
15 In the veto actor vocabulary of Tsebelis (Citation2002: 35), a single-party majority government is a single veto player and is thus unconstrained in the policy outcomes also within the area of integration policy.
16 The countries are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States.
17 Coverage is based on the OECD labor market data which becomes available after 2000 and the coverage of the Comparative Political Dataset 1960–2013 (Armingeon et al. Citation2015).
18 Not all countries experience a single-party majority government during the analysed period. This issue is dealt with in the robustness test section in appendix F.
19 If, for an example, either the left or the right is united in one large party, while its ideological counterpart is fragmented in several smaller parties.
20 See Bergh (Citation2014) for a discussion of Sweden.
21 Results are available upon request. There is also much fewer observations for the replacement rates variables, which is another reason why I have chosen to stick with the general government outlays variable.
22 Research suggest that additional immigration might affect the labor market experiences of other immigrants more than the native population at least with regards to wages (Ottaviano and Peri Citation2012).
23 For example, in the distinction between a restrictive-assimilationist model or a liberal-multicultural model which forms the basis of the integration policy measure used by Lutz (Citation2019), it is not clear whether one of these model are necessarily superior to the other in fostering immigrant labor market integration. Regarding the MIPEX index, it is not clear whether better scores on indicators relating to the MIPEX Index's ‘Family reunion’ dimension have any positive effects on immigrant labor market integration. On the other hand, indicators related to the MIPEX index's ‘Labour market mobility’ dimension might reflect policies which have a real positive effect on immigrant labor market integration.
24 Presumably, integration of immigrants might be easier in English speaking countries or in countries where the native language is very widely spoken and taught abroad.
25 Especially, when taking the influential Varieties of Capitalism approach to comparative differences in public policies and outcomes (Hall and Soskice Citation2001), the issue of fundamental institutional and historical difference between countries is potentially very important.
26 Results can be found in appendix C.
27 The inclusion of this variable somewhat lowers the number of observations, but as shown below, this does, if anything, increase the effect of single-party majority government.
28 The figures are based on estimations where the single-party majority government dummy is replaced with dummies which measure the number of years before and after a single-party majority government comes into office. These regression results can be found in appendix E.
29 Appendix G contains an additional analysis which provides evidence in favor of the theoretical mechanism.
30 For an example, French president Emmanuel Macron’s plan to introduce more proportionally in the French electoral system, ironically after the second round of the French legislative election of 2017 gave his own party a majority in the French National Assembly.
Additional information
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Lasse Aaskoven
Lasse Aaskoven is Lecturer at the Department of Government, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, United Kingdom.