Cultural Versus Economic Threat: The Immigration Effect on Voting for Radical Right Wing Parties

Because many of the radical right-wing parties are known as anti-immigration parties, immigration is believed to encourage people to vote for the parties. Despite the wide-spread belief, however, empirical evidence on the immigration effect on voting for the parties is mixed. This paper suggests that cultural and economic aspects of immigration should be separately considered, and each aspect has dissimilar effects on the voting behaviors of different people, particularly two main supporting groups for the parties: manual workers and the petite bourgeoisie. Using five rounds of the European Social Survey and the multilevel analysis method, we found that while a cultural aspect of immigration (cultural fractionalization) encourages manual workers to vote for the parties, the petite bourgeoisie is motivated by its economic aspect (income inequality between different ethnic groups). In contrast, manual workers are not driven by the economic aspect of immigration to vote for the parties, and the cultural aspect does not make the petite bourgeoisie more likely to vote for the parties. The analysis implies that the immigration effect on radical right-wing parties should be understood in a more multi-dimensional way: different aspects of immigration, as well as the voting behaviors of different supporting groups, should be taken into account.