Looking Under the Hood of Party Competition on Immigration in Europe

Immigration has become a central aspect of party competition in Europe, both as part of the emerging transnational cleavage, as well as on its own. This paper addresses two key questions: First, what makes up the content of the immigration dimension for political parties in Europe? And second, is there significant variation in the types of immigration that these parties support, which would not already be explained by their overall immigration stance? To answer these questions, we report on an immigration-specific module of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey on party positioning in Europe. We ask party politics experts to place parties on immigration-related issue areas, as well as open-ended questions about the key aspects of the immigration dimension in each country. For the former, we differentiate between party positions on high- and low-skilled economic migration, as well as different types of refugee immigration. Our empirical analysis then connects parties’ broader ideological profiles to their positioning on these specific immigration-related topics. In doing so, this research extends our knowledge of party positioning on a key component of the transnational cleavage.