Making the government accountable: rethinking immigration as an issue in the European Union

Andrea Fumarola

doi:10.1080/23745118.2020.1752453

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the last decades, European countries have experienced two relevant waves of immigration. These ‘immigration shocks’ have contributed to increase dramatically public attention on immigration issues but also to structure political competition on both the supply and the demand side of democratic representation. While immigration issue has been traditionally conceived as a positional issue, the consensus among voters and the policy convergence of mainstream parties seem to resemble Stokes’ model and competition is on a valence issue instead of position issue. Therefore, the present paper analyses whether and to what extent voters punish incumbents for high levels of immigration. Using data from the European Election Study, the analysis confirms that while voters perceiving high levels of immigration punish incumbents, performance voting depends on individual-level attributes such as partisanship and salience, but also country-level factors like the government clarity of responsibility. Finally, immigration performance voting is not moderated by issue ownership. However, the perceived competence of parties to manage immigration reveals a direct and independent effect on incumbent vote intention.

Highlights

A basic feature of a quality democracy is the principle that citizens hold the government accountable for its performance
While immigration issue has been traditionally conceived as a positional issue, the consensus among voters and the policy convergence of mainstream parties seem to resemble Stokes’ model and competition is on a valence issue instead of position issue
Model 1 tests the direct effect of immigration evaluations on vote choice in the 27 European Union (EU) countries (‘Immigration performance voting hypothesis’)

Summary

Introduction

A basic feature of a quality democracy is the principle that citizens hold the government accountable for its performance. An extensive literature has traditionally analysed electoral accountability through the lens of economic voting theory, showing that voters evaluate national economic conditions, punishing poor and rewarding good performance (Duch & Stevenson, 2008). Recent research has enlarged the scope of the performance voting theory to other policy or non-policy related factors (Bélanger & Meguid, 2008; Clarke et al, 2009; Ecker et al, 2015; Fumarola, 2018; Singer, 2011; Stokes, 1992). This research belongs to the wider valence framework elaborated by Donald Stokes (1963) who theorizes the existence of a principal-agent linkage in which voters act as the principal evaluating governments on the basis of their ability to achieve shared and desired policy outcomes. The present article focuses on immigration and its adaptation to the analytical framework of the performance voting literature

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