Do Parties Influence the Public Opinion on Immigration? Evidence from Europe

The literature on public opinion about immigration has focused mainly on sociological and economic factors (Pardos-Prado 2011). Several studies have underlined the importance of socio-economic factors, group identification and intergroup contact, among others, in explaining natives’ attitudes toward immigration (Ceobanu and Escandell 2010). However, scholars have largely ignored the role of parties and partisanship (Hainmueller and Hopkins 2014), or the role of policies (except for Jennings 2009) in shaping preferences toward immigration. This paper will address this gap, by giving more emphasis to the role of party-level and context-level factors in explaining individuals’ immigration attitudes. In particular, we are interested in studying whether changes in parties’ positions have the potential to explain shifts in public opinion and if this is moderated by individual-level factors like party identification or political sophistication. In addition, we account for changes in public policies towards migrants, and in the inflows of migrants, as further context-level factors susceptible to influence citizens’ immigration attitudes. Our analysis will focus on West European citizens in the last 15 years, combining data from different sources: individual-level data on immigration preferences (ESS), political parties’ position on this issue (expert surveys) and the evolution of immigration and immigration policies in European countries (Mipex, Eurostat). References Ceobanu, Alin M., and Xavier Escandell. 2010. “Comparative Analyses of Public Attitudes Toward Immigrants and Immigration Using Multinational Survey Data: A Review of Theories and Research.” Annual Review of Sociology 36: 309-328. Hainmueller, Jens, and Daniel J. Hopkins. 2014. “Public Attitudes Toward Immigration.” Annual Review of Political Science 17: 225-249. Jennings, Will. 2009. “The Public Thermostat, Political Responsiveness and Error-Correction: Border Control and Asylum in Britain, 1994–2007.” British Journal of Political Science 39(4): 847-870. Pardos-Prado, Sergi. 2011. “Framing Attitudes Towards Immigrants in Europe: When Competition Does Not Matter.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37(7): 999-1015.