Politicisation of Immigration in Central and Eastern Europe: Evidence from Plenary Debates in Two Countries

ABSTRACT

The research on the party politicization of immigration almost exclusively focuses on West European countries. To address the lack of studies of party politicization (hereafter understood as salience) of immigration in Central and East European countries, we investigate all the parliamentary speeches in Czechia and Slovakia between 2013 and 2017. Descriptively, we show that immigration was almost invisible before the 2015 refugee crisis. On the explanatory level, we show that party placement toward the TAN-pole of the GAL–TAN dimension, Eurosceptic positions, and government participation make it more likely for parliamentarians to politicize immigration.

Acknowledgments

This article is a result of the research supported by the Czech Science Foundation under grant number GA20-29992S “Immigrants, Asylum Seekers, and Refugees during the EU’s Migration Crisis: Analysing Their Framing and Representations in Central and Eastern Europe.” I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of Problems of Post-Communism for their invaluable comments and suggestions. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 8th Congress of the Czech Political Science Association, the UACES 51st Annual Conference, and the 2021 ECPR General Conference. I would like to thank the participants of the conferences for their feedback as well.

Disclosure Statement

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

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2022.2085579

Notes

1. To ensure the robustness of our results, we estimate other alternative model specifications, which we report in Table B2. All the main results remain substantively unchanged across all the specifications.

2. At the same time, it has one of the best goodnesses-of-fits of all the models.

3. Immigrant background is also statistically significant in the majority of our estimations. However, as there is a limited number of parliamentarians with immigrant backgrounds, the results are largely driven by the limited variation of this dependent variable, in particular by one parliamentarian from a radical right party. If removed from the analysis the parameter estimates for immigrant background are far away from reaching conventional levels of statistical significance and effect sizes are negligible. Removing the independent variable from the estimations altogether does not change the substantive findings and we thus decided to keep it.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation [20-29992S].