A Rising Tide? The Salience of Immigration and the Rise of Anti‐Immigration Political Parties in Western Europe

Dennison, James; Geddes, Andrew

doi:10.1111/1467-923x.12620

Cited by 220 publications

(163 citation statements)

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“…Similarly, Donald Trump's birtherism in the 2010s that called Obama's Americanness into question benefitted from the Tea Party's racial resentment against him (Hughey and Parks 2014, Anderson 2016, Hochschild 2018. In Europe, multiculturalism (rather than the discourse of civil rights) has similarly (and more recently) been maligned by conservative and radical right political candidates (Minkenberg 2000, Hewitt 2005, Dennison and Geddes 2019. By the 1990s, white rage had amassed a significant amount of thymotic capital, yet Fukuyama (1993) and Sloterdijk do not consider it systematically.…”

Section: Thymos and White Entitlementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Weaponizing white thymos: flows of rage in the online audiences of the alt-right

Ganesh

2020

Cultural Studies

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The alt-right is a growing radical right-wing network that is particularly effective at mobilizing emotion through digital communications. Introducing 'white thymos' as a framework to theorize the role of rage, anger, and indignation in alt-right communications, this study argues that emotive communication connects alt-right users and mobilizes white thymos to the benefit of populist radical right politics. By combining linguistic, computational, and interpretive techniques on data collected from Twitter, this study demonstrates that the alt-right weaponizes white thymos in three ways: visual documentation of white victimization, processes of legitimization of racialized pride, and reinforcement of the rectitude of rage and indignation. The weaponization of white thymos is then shown to be central to the culture of the alt-right and its connectivity with populist radical right politics. KEYWORDS Alt-right; populist radical right; white nationalism; social media; affect; Twitter The recent increase of research into the alt-right has uncovered much of the structure and ideology of this movement. However, how the alt-right captures the attention of its audiences and the forms of affect and emotion that it mobilizes are aspects of this movement that are not well understood. While the 'alt-right is unlike any racist movement we have ever seen. It is atomized, amorphous, predominantly online, and mostly anonymous' (Hawley 2017, p. 3), it is a product of decades of white supremacist organizing in the United States and far right ideology and narratives in Europe and North America. Moreover, the term alt-right is challenging to define, but it can be understood as an umbrella term for a set of radical right social movements active primarily (but not exclusively) in Anglophone countries. It has come to be understood in the literature as a contingent coalition of activists, usually networked online, that span online troll cultures, misogynists in the manosphere, neofascists, ultranationalists, identitarians, and white

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Section: Thymos and White Entitlementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Weaponizing white thymos: flows of rage in the online audiences of the alt-right

Ganesh

2020

Cultural Studies

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“…van der Brug, 2005) resulting in selection on the dependent variable; and the observable decline in xenophobic and antiimmigration in recent years (e.g. Dennison and Geddes, 2018a) despite a rise in support for the PRR in the same period. Implicitly, in the 'cultural backlash' theory, the latter issue is rationalised as the shrinking group of more xenophobic voters being more activated as a result of the changing majority values, but this activation remains underspecified.…”

Section: Literature Explaining Populist Radical Right Electoral Successmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Arzheimer (2009, see also Arzheimer andCarter, 2006) use the prominence-or salience-of immigration in the manifestos of all mainstream parties to show that salience has a positive impact on PRR success. More recently, Dennison and Geddes (2018a) show that the public salience of immigration-using Eurobarometer data-is strongly positively correlated with populist radical right party support over time in most Western European countries. Dennison (2019b) takes this further using panel data models to show that the salience of only immigration has a positive effect at the national level, while the salience of crime, the economy, terrorism and unemployment have no positive effect.…”

Section: On Issue Salience and Social Stigmamentioning

confidence: 99%

When Do Populist Radical Right Parties Succeed? Salience, Stigma, and the Case of the End of Iberian ‘Exceptionalism’

Dennison

Mendes

2019

SSRN Journal

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This study offers an explanatory model for variation in electoral results for 'populist radical right' parties in Europe over time and across countries. We build on and fuse previous explanations to offer a theoretical model that combines supply-and demand-side explanations. We argue that such parties succeed when they are able to avoid the stigma of extremism by initially catering to an unsatiated demand of right-wing voters on a 'less controversial', highly salient issue. With their relatively minor place in the party system confirmed and equipped with a 'reputation shield' that extremist parties do not enjoy, they are able to refocus on more controversial, other highly salient issues, typically immigration, potentially leading to greater potential mobilisation. We use the case of the Spanish party Vox, as well as the erstwhile, anomalous lack of success for similar parties across Portugal and Spain, to test our framework. We show that both the historic lack of populist radical right party success across Iberia, the relative greater success in the rest of western Europe and the recent rise of Vox can be explained neatly by this framework of salience, stigma and supply.

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“…There has been arguably no greater hot-button issue than immigration in recent U.S. elections, as well as in Western European politics (Dennison and Geddes 2019). Not only is immigration important for its clear policy implications, but it has been the main issue for radial right parties (Dennison and Geddes 2019;Dahlström and Sundell 2012). Given immigration's political salience, we would expect both Democrats and Republicans to champion clear positions on it and make it a focal point of their respective platforms.…”

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confidence: 99%

Divided Dems, United Reps: Party strategy and within-party variation in immigration attitudes

Bock¹

2020

Preprint

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There is a large and growing body of literature on the political polarization of socio-politicalattitudes. This work, however, often treats parties as homogeneous groups, missing underlying within-partyvariation. This paper argues that social scientists should measure attitudinal trends at three levels: 1) theaggregate, 2) parties, and 3) within parties. Using several waves of ANES data between 1992 and 2016, Iapply this analytic strategy to the study of immigration attitudes—one of the most salient issues currentlyoccupying the U.S. political arena. The results suggest a number of important findings. First, immigrationattitudes have been fairly stable at the aggregate level, and have, if anything, become more pro-immigrationover time. Second, while immigration attitudes have become slightly more favorable over the past twentyyears, these trends in the aggregate mask drastic party polarization since 2008, with Republicans becomingsharply more anti-immigration and Democrats becoming more pro-immigration. Third, while the partieshave clearly grown apart, the attitudes within the parties have not trended uniformly: while Democrats havebecome more pro-immigration over the last several years, they have also grown more variable on this issue.The growing divide among Democrats can be explained by emergent ideological and partisan cleavages, withliberals and “strong” Democrats largely driving the party’s pro-immigration trends. In contrast, Republicanshave become more anti-immigration and consistently so; while there were previously significant differencesamong Republicans along regional, religious, and racial lines, these differences have collapsed, and the resultis a largely uniform Republican party on immigration. I conclude with a discussion of how studying withinpartyvariation may provide valuable insight into how parties establish policy platforms and selling pointsin campaigns; further, clear within-party divides may serve as signs of future party realignment along thelines of salient, dividing issues.

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A Rising Tide? The Salience of Immigration and the Rise of Anti‐Immigration Political Parties in Western Europe

Cited by 220 publications

References 4 publications

Weaponizing white thymos: flows of rage in the online audiences of the alt-right

Weaponizing white thymos: flows of rage in the online audiences of the alt-right

When Do Populist Radical Right Parties Succeed? Salience, Stigma, and the Case of the End of Iberian ‘Exceptionalism’

Divided Dems, United Reps: Party strategy and within-party variation in immigration attitudes

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