Is Europe’s right wing turn due to immigration? Empirical evidence from Italy

Pierre Georges Van Wolleghem,Nicola Pasini

doi:10.1515/openps-2020-0008

Abstract

AbstractImmigration has unquestionably gained importance in Italian public opinion over the past few years; but what has been its effect on politics? Building on a recent trend in literature, this paper appraises the effect of immigration on the success of far-right parties. We analyze the results of the elections from 2001, when immigration was still marginal, to the last elections held in 2018. Applying time-series-cross-section methods to an original dataset, we find that immigration has had a consistent effect on votes for the far-right. Interestingly, we also show that economic factors likely weigh more on far-right votes than immigration.

Highlights

Immigration has unquestionably gained importance in Italian public opinion over the past few years; but what has been its effect on politics? Building on a recent trend in literature, this paper appraises the effect of immigration on the success of far-right parties
To answer our research question, we propose to assess the effect of the share of foreigners in each of the Italian regions on the share of ballots that goes to far-right parties out of the total of the votes cast in an election year
Whilst a great deal of specialized scholarship has looked into people’s attitudes towards immigration, a recent trend in literature seeks to investigate the effect of immigration on election outcomes

Summary

Introduction

Immigration has unquestionably gained importance in Italian public opinion over the past few years; but what has been its effect on politics? Building on a recent trend in literature, this paper appraises the effect of immigration on the success of far-right parties. Whereas the study on the determinants of people’s attitudes towards foreigners are plentiful (see inter alia Dustmann and Preston 2001; Mayda 2006; O’Rourke and Sinnott 2006; Card, Dustmann and Preston 2012), only recently has the focus turned to the effect of immigration on far-right parties’ electoral outcomes (Dustmann, Vsiljeva and Piil Damm 2016; Halla, Wagner and Zweimüller 2017; Becker and Fetzer 2016; Davis and Deole 2017) Most of these studies regard countries with a long-standing migration history.

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