The Impact of the Migration Crisis on the Electoral Politics in Europe

The main goal of the paper is to analyze the electoral consequences of the migration crisis by testing a set of hypotheses developed from the silent counter-revolution thesis (Kriesi et al. 2008, Ignazi 1992) and the literature dealing with the party system change (Mair 1997, Pedersen 1979, Tavits 2006) stressing the element of the crisis (Kriesi and Pappas, eds., 2015, Moffitt 2015). The underlying assumption of the article is that while the cultural conflict changed the electoral politics in Europe before the crisis, the growing importance of the issue of immigration since the outbreak of the crisis has affected the electoral politics in an even greater extent. The complexity of electoral politics offers several ways how to assess the change of electoral politics caused by the migration crisis. First, the article analyzes the electoral fortune of different species of political parties. Similarly to the models of economic voting (van der Brug et al. 2007), we expect that íncumbent political parties are being held responsible for the assumed effects of immigration. However, we expect the effect to be conditioned by the actual immigration policy of the government, the public opinion on migration and the impact of the migration in the given country. Also, given their ideological platform, some political parties should benefit more from the migration crisis. We expect that the radical right-wing parties benefit from the migration crisis (Rydgren 2006, Stockemer 2016), although the actual effects of the migration and the public opinion in the given country moderates the effect. Second, given the party system level of the analysis into account, we expect that the migration crisis increases volatility, the party system fragmentation, and polarization (de-alignment and re-alignment) (Dassonville 2018, Dalton 2008). The alternative explanations including the institutional setting and the economic conditions are controlled for in the analysis. The article contributes to the existing knowledge about the effects of migration in two ways. While the established literature is commonly based on the cross-sectional examination of the limited number of (mostly West European) cases, the present paper offers a systemic evaluation of all members states of the European Union. Also, the paper stresses the element of a change and analyzes the effects of the crisis over time.