Immigration attitudes and Voting Behaviour: The mediating role of salience

Immigration issues have been shown to divide voters at the edges of the so-called “socio-cultural cleavage” in Western Europe, between voters of Radical Right and Green parties. Although divisions between those with extreme opinions are most evident, the question remains, how to explain “the rest” of the population. In this paper, I argue that there are good reasons to believe that not only preferences, but also the salience of immigration is an important factor in explaining the link between voting and immigration attitudes more generally. Whereas some voters care more about economic issues such as the welfare state and taxation, others care more (or are primed to care more) about cultural issues, and this could tip their voting tendencies, too. In this paper, I investigate whether the salience of immigration impacts upon their vote choice between mainstream left and right parties on the one hand and far-right and "new" left (Green) on the other. To do so, I use data from a novel survey of 3000 individuals in German cities, collected between 2019-2020. I propose a measure of subjective immigration salience as the extent to which individuals perceive immigration as a prominent element of their living environment. I find that individuals with similar attitudes towards immigration, who perceive immigration as a more prominent feature of their neighbourhood (either as a difference or similarity), are more likely to vote along the socio-cultural dimension than those for whom immigration is less important. This study thus highlights the need to consider not just attitudes, but also the salience, of immigration concerns when considering voting behaviour.