Political and institutional determinants of immigration policies

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates how the interplay of parties' preferences, political institutions and electoral competition affects the liberalisation of immigration policies. It joins a growing body of research that focuses on the role of domestic factors in shaping immigration policies. While several studies point to the important role of partisanship and the activation of public opinion, they fail to provide a clear mechanism that takes into account differences in parties' preferences as well as the institutional context they act in. By adding two crucial factors to the analysis, this paper presents a new framework for liberal change in the field of immigration politics. First, institutional veto points determine if left-of-centre parties can reform policies according to their preferences. Second, the degree of electoral competition and the politicisation of immigration issues affect how susceptible political parties are to the anti-immigrant sentiment in the population. A time-series cross-section analysis of 11 countries from 1980 to 2006 shows that left-of-centre governments are more likely to pass liberal reforms, but only if they are not facing an open veto point. Moreover, increased levels of electoral competition coupled with a politicisation of the immigration issue reduces the likelihood of liberal reforms.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• political institutions
• electoral competition

Acknowledgments

For helpful comments, I would like to thank Christoffer Green-Pedersen, Marc Helbling, Ellen Immergut, Martin Kroh, as well as the editor and three anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. While this study focuses on immigration policies, a part of the literature deals with the more narrow area of citizenship policies, which can be regarded as a subfield of immigration policies. The hypothesis derived in this paper build on those insights that can be reasonably transferred to the more general field.

2. This paper limits itself to analysing liberalisation as the politics of restrictive change should follow a fundamentally different logic because they are far less an exercise in blame avoidance and should depend on different agenda setting events. Integrating these diverging incentives lies beyond the scope of this paper.

3. The exact procedure of the coding is to subtract the shares of pro immigration issues (per607 and per705 in the data) from the negative issues (per601, per602 and per608 in the data).

4. The countries included in this study are Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK. Compared to the original data set this study includes the USA, Luxembourg and Japan. Japan and Luxembourg for data availability reasons and the US as a presidential system where party competition follows different incentives.

5. A detailed description of the laws can be found here: http://migration.oxfordjournals.org /content/1/1/47/suppl/DC1.

6. For Switzerland the government mean is used. All results are robust to excluding Switzerland from the analysis.