A losing gamble. How mainstream parties facilitate anti-immigrant party success
Highlights
► A tougher position on immigration by mainstream parties helps to legitimize anti-immigrant parties, and benefits them electorally. ► However, in contrast to previous research, we find that it is not the position of the most extreme mainstream party that matters, but rather the mean position of all the mainstream parties. ► We use a pioneering survey of over 10,000 local elected representatives in Sweden to measure sub-national variation in the position on immigration among the political parties.
Introduction
In the past three decades, a new brand of political parties has emerged in Western Europe.2 Today, anti-immigrant parties are represented in parliaments in countries all over Europe, although their electoral support is unstable. This paper explores one promising explanation for short-term variations in anti-immigrant party support and tests this explanation in a unique sub-national dataset. More specifically, the paper investigates whether mainstream parties’ positions in the immigration issue (tough stance on immigration or not) facilitate or impede anti-immigrant party electoral support.3
Using time-variant cross-country data and pooled election studies, scholars have been able to draw stable conclusions on gender, class and other socio-economic characteristics of anti-immigrant voters (Arzheimer, 2009, Arzheimer and Carter, 2006, Norris, 2005, van der Brug et al., 2005). The literature has also explored the effects of institutional settings, such as electoral systems and parliamentary thresholds (Jackman and Volpert, 1996, Swank and Betz, 2003), the history and ideological origin of anti-immigrant parties (Carter, 2002, Ivarsflaten, 2006) and factors triggering citizen demand for anti-immigrant policy, such as levels of and changes in immigration and unemployment (Arzheimer, 2009, Golder, 2003, Knigge, 1998, Lubbers et al., 2002).
However, even in the probably most comprehensive study thus far, where answers from 175,000 respondents in 18 countries over a time period of 23 years were analyzed, the author concluded, “persistent country effects prevail” (Arzheimer, 2009, 259). This underlines that we have still not reached a full understanding of the dynamics leading up to electoral anti-immigrant party success, in spite of the high sophistication in the field.
In our view, the most promising line of research in this field explores the effects of issue strategies of mainstream parties (Arzheimer, 2009, Arzheimer and Carter, 2006, Bale, 2003, Green-Pedersen and Krogstrup, 2008, Meguid, 2005, Meguid, 2008). The basic idea is that mainstream parties can impede or facilitate the growth of anti-immigrant parties depending on how they handle the issue of immigration. Two inter-related factors have been identified in this literature: the salience of the immigration issue and the mainstream parties’ position on the issue.
Research has shown that anti-immigrant parties benefit from the high saliency of the immigration issue. These results are stable both when tested on an individual and a system level (Arzheimer, 2009, Arzheimer and Carter, 2006, Bale, 2003), implying that a “dismissive” strategy that keeps the saliency of the issue low is the most effective (Meguid, 2005, 350).
However, empirical evidence is more ambiguous when it comes to the effects of mainstream party stance in the immigration issue. Two rival hypotheses can be crystallized from the literature. The first – the impeding hypothesis – says that we should expect a decline in electoral support for anti-immigrant parties if mainstream parties take a tough position on immigration, as the mainstream parties thereby take ownership of the immigration issue (Meguid, 2005, Meguid, 2008, van der Brug et al., 2005). The second – the facilitating hypothesis – holds the opposite expectation. It says that if mainstream parties take a tough position on immigration, voters interpret this as a signal that tougher policies are relevant, which helps the anti-immigrant party to overcome a barrier of non-respectability and thus helps it to gain more votes (Arzheimer, 2009, Arzheimer and Carter, 2006, Bale, 2003).
These hypotheses have been tested in cross-country studies, but results are hampered by small n-problems. Even in the more sophisticated studies, not more than 22 (van der Brug et al., 2005) or 24 (Arzheimer and Carter, 2006) elections are included, which makes it hard to draw firm conclusions about the effects of different strategies. This paper therefore employs a different research strategy and tests these two rival hypotheses using data on the 290 Swedish local governments in the 2010 elections.
The sub-national setting is ideal, as it keeps important institutional and cultural factors constant while it exhibits rich variation both in the strategies’ mainstream parties’ use and in electoral anti-immigrant party support. We have at our disposal unique data capturing the immigration policy positions among politicians at the local level in Sweden that allow us to evaluate the effects of tougher immigration issue positions among the mainstream parties.
Our main results support the facilitating hypothesis. We therefore conclude that tough policy positions of mainstream parties in the immigration issue help anti-immigrant party success. However, contrary to previous research, we demonstrate that it is not sufficient for one mainstream party to take a tougher stance on immigration. In order to affect the electoral success of the anti-immigrant party, the whole immigration discourse must become tougher, which we interpret as a legitimizing effect. We also report the perhaps counterintuitive result that tougher positions of the parties on the political left are more important for anti-immigrant party success than tougher positions of the parties on the political right.
Section snippets
Tough policy positions and anti-immigrant party support
Theories of prime interest for this paper are those that focus on the effects of strategies of mainstream parties. Both classical theories of party competition (Downs, 1957) and more recent theories of party strategies (Meguid, 2005, Meguid, 2008) highlight the strategic importance of competing parties’ policy positions. As mentioned in the introduction, two rival hypotheses have evolved from this discussion. In the more classical view a competing party can take voters from an anti-immigrant
The case: Swedish local governments
Since our methodological approach differs in some respects from the convention of cross-country comparisons, some clarifications are called for. One obvious advantage of using data on the sub-national level is that these data have been less analyzed than data on the national level (see however Bowyer, 2008, Coffé et al., 2007, Kestilä and Söderlund, 2007, Lubbers and Scheepers, 2001, Lubbers and Scheepers, 2002, Rydgren and Ruth, 2011 for examples of studies on anti-immigrant parties on the
Data and methodology
The dependent variable is the percentage of valid votes received by the Sweden Democrats in the municipal elections of 2010, which is logged to account for skewness. The main independent variable is the toughness of the mainstream parties on the immigration issue. Arzheimer and Carter (2006) and Arzheimer (2009) use manifesto data to determine how tough mainstream parties are on immigration. While this approach is fruitful in cross-country comparisons, it is less successful in within-country
Results
The two main independent variables, maximum and mean mainstream party anti-immigration toughness, are tested in three models each, with different sets of control variables. In Table 2, models 1 and 2 control only for the support for SD in 2006. Socio-economic controls are introduced in models 3 and 4, while regional dummy variables are introduced in models 5 and 6. Models 1, 3 and 5 thus test the effect of a tougher average policy position on immigration among mainstream parties (mean
Conclusions
In this paper, we argue that short-term variations in electoral support for anti-immigrant parties are affected by the mainstream parties’ policy positions on immigration. Research has suggested that a tough position can both impede and facilitate anti-immigrant parties. We tested these two competing hypotheses, using a unique sub-national dataset on the 290 Swedish local governments in the 2010 elections. The results show that, if mainstream parties take a tough position on immigration, this
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