https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3008-9686
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ABSTRACT
Despite a rich literature on the factors influencing the public opinion on immigration, less is known about the top-down effects of political parties and policies on the public’s preferences in this domain. We analyse in this paper the impact of political parties’ positions and of immigration policies on citizens’ attitudes toward immigration. We are interested in the effects of public policy understood both in terms of policy regime, that is, country specific regulations on immigration, and policy outcomes, such as the stocks of immigrant population. The results we obtain, based on data covering twenty-three European countries during the period 2002–2011, point to the existence of top-down influences on citizens’ immigration attitudes.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 The twenty-three countries are: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
2 Data are available at http://www.europeansocialsurvey.org
3 The ESS items refer to: (1) people of the same race or ethnic group as most people in the host country, (2) people of a different race or ethnic group from most people in the host country, and (3) people coming from poorer countries outside Europe. The answer categories are on a four-point scale, ranging from ‘Allow many to come and live here’ to ‘Allow none’. Before performing the principal-component factor analysis the scale has been reversed so that higher values correspond to more tolerant positions about allowing immigrants to settle.
4 The respondents are asked to indicate, on a scale from 0 to 10, whether immigration: (1) is bad or good for the country’s economy, (2) undermines or enriches the country’s cultural life, and (3) makes the host country a worse or a better place to live.
5 We determine the year in which the ESS interviews were conducted on the basis of the specific dates of the fieldwork in each country. Note also that information on party positions is based on party programmes. In that case, we measure this variable at the time of the previous national election.
6 We rely on the dataset version 2016b, available at https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu.
7 This measure is the same as the one used by Abou-Chadi (Citation2016) in a robustness check, except that it oppositely signed.
8 Available at http://www.impic-project.eu/data/.
9 Data available from http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/database.
10 The value for the stock of foreign population in Poland in 2002 was missing. We replaced it with the average of the 2001 and 2003 values.
11 The unemployment rate was retrieved from EU Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) of Eurostat (http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/database). Data on GDP per capita (US dollars (thousand), constant prices, fixed PPPs, OECD reference year 2010, seasonally adjusted) comes from OECD’s Quarterly National Accounts available online at https://stats.oecd.org/. Data on social expenditure as percentage of GDP comes from OECD’s Social expenditure database available at: https://stats.oecd.org/.
12 The class schema has been constructed relying on the syntax files provided by Daniel Oesch, available at http://people.unil.ch/danieloesch/scripts/.
13 Results available from the authors.
14 Trend file available at: http://chesdata.eu. The scale of the item has been reversed so that larger scores indicate less restrictive party positions on immigration.
15 Since the relevant groups are not the same for party positions and immigration policies, we perform two separate robustness checks.
16 In doing that, we only kept parties with at least ten ESS respondents.
17 Only one of these studies controls for party (system) characteristics. To assess the impact of media issue-attention on public support for anti-immigrant parties, Boomgaarden and Vliegenthart (Citation2007) control for the position of the mainstream right party and the convergence between mainstream parties. They do not find significant effects of the two variables, possibly due to limited variation over time in the country under study (Boomgaarden and Vliegenthart Citation2007, 412).
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Notes on contributors
Alina Vrânceanu
Alina Vrânceanu is currently a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute. Her research interests include political behaviour, public opinion, party competition and immigration politics. She completed her PhD at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in November 2018. Her PhD Thesis focused on the relationship between public opinion and party positions on the immigration issue.
Romain Lachat
Romain Lachat is assistant professor of political behavior at Sciences Po, Cevipof, Paris. His research focuses on the comparative analysis of electoral behaviour and on political representation. He is particularly interested in the impact of political institutions and party characteristics on individual-level behaviour.