Immigration-related political culture and support for radical right parties

ABSTRACT

Radical right parties are not equally successful across or within all countries. Most studies have up to now relied on socio-economic, socio-structural and political factors to explain these differences. We examine whether the immigration-related political culture – consisting of integration policies and shared conservative values – in which voters are embedded influences radical right voting. We argue that more exclusive immigration-culture is related to more support for radical right parties. Furthermore, the relationship between immigration attitudes and radical right support is expected to be moderated by immigration-culture. With multilevel regression models using data from the 2011 Swiss Electoral Studies (SELECTS) we compare the effect of immigration-culture in 26 Swiss cantons. We find that cantonal immigration-culture (assessed with integration regimes and shared conservative beliefs) increases radical right support and the effect of individuals' immigration attitude on radical right support is stronger when immigration-culture is exclusive.

KEYWORDS:

• Political culture
• immigration attitudes
• radical right voting
• multilevel

Acknowledgement

We thank Anita Manatschal for helpful comments on a previous draft of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 There is only one study examining the role integration regimes play in radical right voting. In a cross-national study, Werts, Scheepers, and Lubbers (2013) found that national integration policies had no effect on radical right voting. They however used this policy index as a control variable and consequently did not develop theoretical arguments or discuss the findings.

2 The Swiss constitution dictates that policies are regulated at the cantonal level, including immigrant-related matters, unless explicitly delegated to the federal level.

3 Since previous SELECTS surveys did not have an immigration attitude module, we instead use conservative attitudes that are related to negative immigration attitudes and have frequently been associated with the radical right vote in Switzerland.

4 Ideally, we would control at the individual level for the variables that we use to construct the shared conservatism score. Unfortunately, these variables are not included in the 2011 SELECTS.

5 Because information on the number of Muslim immigrants by canton is not available we instead use the proportion of immigrants from countries in which the majority of the population is Muslim. If more than 50% of the population is Muslim, according to the CIA World Factbook, the country is considered predominantly Muslim. Most Muslims living in Switzerland come from the countries that were previously part of Yugoslavia and Turkey.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation [grant number 10FI13_133957/1].