Our latest post is by team member Christopher Cochrane of the University of Toronto. Chris’s research interests focus on left-right ideological disagreement:
People do not invariably blame immigrants for socioeconomic ills like high rates of
crime and unemployment. And people’s minds are not blank grey screens that are shaken,
erased, and re-written at the whims of political elites. Anti-immigrant sentiment appears
to spike, however, when elite political discourse projects immigration against a backdrop
of socioeconomic misery. This basic finding persists over time and across countries, and
it persists within countries as well (Hopkins, 2010; Cochrane and Nevitte, 2014). What
matters for public opinion, it seems, is the interaction between elite political discourse and
the conditions that people experience in the environment around them.
There are generally more immigrants in economically prosperous regions than in economically depressed ones, and immigrants are more likely to arrive during economic upturns than during economic downswings. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s rhetoric to the contrary,
two million immigrants does not equal “two million French people out of work” (quoted
in Jackman and Volpert, 1996, 507). Reality is one thing, however, perception is another.
On this front, it seems much harder to convince people that the unemployment rate is
high, even when it is not, than it is to convince people that immigrants are to blame for
a high unemployment rate, even when they are not. The realm of plausibility has limits, but there is a great deal of space for politicians to manoeuvre within these limits.
Anti-immigrant frames are particularly potent when they weave tangible and established
threads of widespread social concern into the public’s conception of immigration.
Who says what about immigration in national legislative debates, and when and why
do they say it? Presumably, immigration has defenders as well as detractors. Has the
framing of immigration changed over time? The contemporary frames that link immigration to concerns about protecting gender equality and gay rights are almost certainly
different than the frames that prevailed when most people cared hardly at all about either
of these concerns. What about cross-national variation? If immigrants tend to cluster geographically within countries, then there may be differences in national legislative debates between, on the one hand, countries where politicians represent electoral districts and on the other hand, countries where they do not. What about the effects of demographic changes? It seems reasonable to conjecture that the frequency of political discussions about immigration bears some connection to rate of immigration, but what is the nature of this connection? When it comes to debates about immigration in national legislatures, there are a number of questions to explore. Answering these questions begins by tracking across time the legislative debates in many different countries.
References
Cochrane, C. and N. Nevitte (2014). Scapegoating: Unemployment, far-right parties and anti-immigrant sentiment. Comparative European Politics 12 (1), 1–32.
Hopkins, D. J. (2010). Politicized places: Explaining where and when immigrants provoke local opposition. American Political Science Review 104 (1), 40–60.
Jackman, R. and K. Volpert (1996). Conditions favoring parties of the extreme right in western europe. British Journal of Political Science 26 (4), 501–521.