‘Are we losing touch?’ Mainstream parties' failure to represent their voters on immigration and its electoral consequences

David W Brady,John A Ferejohn,Aldo Paparo

doi:10.1017/ipo.2019.42

Abstract

AbstractIn many advanced democracies, mainstream political parties have been disrupted either by the rise of new (populist) parties or by hostile takeovers. In this article we argue that immigration attitudes have had a powerful impact on the strategic environment of political parties and leaders. We show, based on evidence from a comparative study conducted by YouGov in spring of 2015, that immigration attitudes had, by that time, driven a wedge between mainstream parties – those that regularly play a role in government – and their partisans. This ‘immigration gap’ opened up enormous space for new political movements to form, either inside existing parties or outside. Furthermore, we show that the representation gap on immigration issues is a relevant predictor of vote choice, so that parties are particularly likely to lose votes when they are more distant from their supporters on immigration.

Highlights

In many advanced democracies, mainstream political parties have been disrupted either by the rise of new parties or by hostile takeovers
Building on the insight of these seminal contributions about retrospective voting, we argue that the following hypotheses provide a robust test for the electoral effects of the representation gap on immigration: H3: We expect that the more distant on immigration a voter is from the mainstream party she previously voted for the more likely she will not vote for that party in the future
We examine the effects that the representation gap on immigration has on electoral behaviour

Summary

Introduction

Mainstream political parties have been disrupted either by the rise of new (populist) parties or by hostile takeovers. This article analyses the social, political and economic causes of the gap that empirically emerges between parties and voters on immigration, and it investigates its electoral consequence.

Results

Conclusion