Immigration and the transnational European centre-right: a common programmatic response?

Abstract

As aspects of immigration policy are brought into the competence of the EU, the role of transnational parties in co-ordinating policy choices across national boundaries grows in importance. Yet immigration is often seen as a cross-cutting issue and transnational parties have limited capacity to enforce programmatic uniformity across national member parties. We explore both of these issues by mapping the stances of transnational and national party manifestos on immigration policy at EP elections. We argue that ideology does structure party positions on immigration but that separating immigration control from migrant integration is essential to understanding partisan differences. While Christian Democrat and Conservative parties do not differ significantly from their Socialist equivalents on control issues, Liberal parties are less restrictionist. On integration, both Christian Democrats/Conservatives and Liberals are less multicultural than Socialist and Green parties.

Keywords:

• Election manifestos
• EU
• immigration
• political parties.

Notes

1. After 2004, the EFGP became the European Green Party (EGP). For consistency, we use the earlier name.

2. All statistics here from Eurostat http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/. Accessed 6/06/07.

3. Lahav fails to provide figures for Green MEPs on the question of greater/less immigration.

4. We are very grateful to Abdul Noury for providing us with the MEP Immigration Index dataset.

5. Euromanifestos Project, MZES/University of Mannheim, pre-release 1979–2004 (February 2007). We are very grateful to Andreas Wüst for making this data available.

6. See Milner and Judkins (2004) for a similar construction of a (non-left–right) scale based on manifesto data.

7. Hix and Noury's MEP migration scores have been reversed for ease of comparison.