Politicisation and salience of immigration in Central and Eastern Europe

Extensive research shows that politicisation of immigration by political parties in has been increasing on average since approximately the beginning of 1990s. This research demonstrates that, among others, issue ownership, the position on the left-right and GAL-TAN dimensions of conflict affect the levels of salience political parties attach to immigration. Most of this research, however, focuses only on political parties in Western Europe and it uses election manifestos as the key source of data to investigate politicisation and salience of immigration. While election manifestos have a number of advantages as they provide authoritative statements of party stance towards immigration and allow for easy cross-national and temporal comparison, they are arguably static. They allow assessing the salience of immigration at election time only but not in the periods between any two elections. To provide a more dynamic assessment of the salience political parties attach to immigration and to address the lack of studies on Central and Eastern European countries, we investigate all parliamentary speeches in Czechia and Slovakia between 2013 and 2017 (N = 59 792). On the descriptive level, we show that immigration was almost invisible before the EU refugee crisis. Its salience spiked dramatically between 2015 and 2016 which was followed by a progressive decrease of salience in 2017. Those trends are almost impossible to detect using the static approach based on election manifestos. On the explanatory level, we find that, unlike government/opposition status, party position on the left-right and GAL-TAN dimensions are related to the extent a political party emphasises immigration. Moreover, older parliamentarians, men and those with immigrant background are more likely to address immigration.