Immigration and Left Party Government in Europe

Abstract

Are governments of the Left more or less immigration-friendly than governments of the Right? Are they more or less likely to restrict immigration during their tenure (or to seek selective immigration policies). And, to what extent do the answers to these questions depend on other factors, such as the characteristics of a country’s political economy? Based on existing work on the determinants of voter preferences for immigration policy and the electoral tensions faced by Left party elites, we hypothesize that , other things being equal, immigration creates particular electoral tensions for parties of the Left, and that parties of the Left may therefore be more, rather than less, likely to restrict immigration when they are in government than parties of the Right. However, we also suspect that the degree of electoral tension faced by parties of the Left (and hence their policies when in government) are likely to depend, at least in part, on other aspects of a country’s political economy. We focus in this paper on particular characteristics of national welfare states. In the first section of the paper, we develop a number of hypotheses regarding the electoral tensions that immigration is likely to create for Left party governments. We draw on the theoretical literatures on the economic impact of that immigration tends to have on different segments of the population, on the effect that immigration may have on the support for redistributive social policies among voters, and on the social and ideological electoral space within which parties of the Left operate in post-Fordist societies. When taken together, the insights of these various literatures lead us to conclude that, all things being equal, Left party governments should be at least equally, if not more, likely to seek to restrict immigration than governments dominated by the Right. We also discuss how specific features of national welfare states (specifically, the extent to which social policies address the needs of middle income families such as child care, elder care, and other household services) may affect the balance of preferences regarding immigration within national electorates. Where social policies do not address these needs, we hypothesize that immigrants often come to play the role of compensating for the absence of government services/benefits in these areas (by providing affordable child and elder care as well as other services that families depend on). Lastly, we also offer some ideas on how immigration might affect the social spending priorities of governments of the Left.