Politicized ethno-racial shock as group threat: “Refugee crisis” immigration and anti-immigrant voting in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Far-right politics has gained significant support across Europe in recent decades. Previous literature has investigated the conditions that lead to immigrants being perceived as “threats”, leading to increased support for anti-immigrant parties. However, how certain “shock events” – times of dramatic change – mobilize far-right support around anti-immigrant sentiment has been understudied. Drawing on social movement literature, I examine how support for anti-immigrant politics was driven by demographic change during the “refugee crisis” in Sweden. I use a unique dataset on Swedish municipalities (N = 290) between 2014 and 2018 to examine the relationship between immigration and far-right outcomes. I show that increases in Syrian immigrants during the “refugee crisis” led to significant gains in support for anti-immigrant politics at the municipal level. I suggest that the “refugee crisis” constituted a politicized ethno-racial shock that lead to increases in far-right support, as political actors seized on increased immigration to mobilize around threat perceptions.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-immigrant sentiment
• ethno-racial threat
• far-right politics
• shock events
• refugee crisis
• group threat

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Hana Shepherd, Lauren Krivo, Ali Chaudhary, Elizabeth Arthur, and Aaron Martin at Rutgers University for their sustained and invaluable feedback throughout the development of this work. She also wishes to thank Statistics Sweden for their support in the data collection process.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 I use the terms “ethno-racial” and “ethno-racialization” to fully encapsulate “how racism co-mingles race and ethnicity in racialization processes” (Aranda 2017, 2236). These terms are specifically useful in the context of immigration to Europe, as Middle Eastern and North Africans are often considered “White” (e.g. in the U.S. census) but are nonetheless subject to forms of racism and prejudice (Maghbouleh 2020), as I will discuss in detail later.

2 I place “refugee crisis” in quotation marks to challenge the European spectacularization of the 2015/2016 arrival of refugees to Europe and the portrayal of it as a “crisis” (henceforth referred to as the “perceived refugee crisis” without quotation marks). Although the perceived refugee crisis marked a significant demographic event in Sweden, as I will argue later, it is important to note that the vast majority of Syrian refugees were displaced into countries that neighbour Syria and not into Europe (Chouliaraki and Stolic 2017). While the peak of arrivals to Sweden occurred in 2015 and 2016, the refugee crisis around the world is ongoing – a total of 11.1 million are currently in need of humanitarian support (UNCHR 2020).

3 The competing framework of intergroup contact argues that social contact between the minority and majority groups can serve to reduce prejudice (e.g. Allport 1954). As the minority group increases in size, the potential for intergroup contact to take place also increases, leading to a reduction in prejudice. However, the effect of the size of the immigrant group on attitudes is not consistent because contact only acts as a mechanism to reduce prejudice in some cases (Eger and Bohman 2016; Pottie-Sherman and Wilkes 2017). For example, in highly segregated social contexts – like in most cases of newly arrived refugees – contact is unlikely and therefore does not mitigate the formation of a sense of group threat (Dinas et al. 2019; Hopkins 2010).

4 Other quadratic terms did not yield statistically significant results.