The Refugee Crisis, Immigration Attitudes, Euroscepticism and the Vote for the Radical Right

Between 2014 and 2016, the EU member countries faced, the so-called European refugee crisis, one of the most profound crisis in the EU’s history. The crisis had several levels: (1) it was a migration crisis as EU countries struggled to accommodate several million new arrivals. (2) It triggered a crisis of governance as the EU countries have so far failed to come up with effective common policies to handle this sort of crisis in a sustainable manner, and (3) it increased fears of terrorism as well as economic and social fears among parts of the population. In this paper, we ask the question: how did these fears translate into increased anti-immigration attitudes, increased Euroscepticism, and increased support for the European radical right. We examine this threefold relationship using three European countries with a traditional and strong radical right that held national elections in 2015 and 2016 (i.e. Poland, Finland, and the UK). Using data from the European Social Survey, we find that compared to 2010 and 2011 anti-immigration attitudes and Euroscepticism did not increase in the population. Yet, what increased was the propensity of those with anti-immigration and Eurosceptic attitudes to vote for a radical right-wing party.