Immigrant voters against their will: a focus group analysis of identities, political issues and party allegiances among German resettlers during the 2017 bundestag election campaign
“…Immigrants supporting a party known for its anti‐immigrant programme might at first seem counterintuitive, but recent analysis indicates that immigrants from Russia and some former states of the Soviet Union – the so‐called ‘late re‐settlers’‐ show disproportionally high levels of support for the AfD (Goerres et al. ). While we have no information on the respondents’ country of origin in our data, we strongly expect that AfD support is strongest among the group of Russian‐speaking immigrants with German citizenship, as AfD advertises widely among this voter group, for instance with an election manifesto written in Russian.…”
Using data from a recent nationwide survey, we provide the first analysis of the supporter base of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) since the party's split and ideological re‐orientation in mid‐2015. Hypotheses are derived from the literature on Populist Radical Right Parties (PRRPs) in Western Europe. Our findings indicate that AfD support—despite the party's euro crisis origins and rapid organizational and ideational changes—is by now due to largely the same set of socio‐economic, attitudinal and contextual factors proven important for PRRP parties elsewhere. Right‐wing political attitudes concerning immigration, political distrust, fears of personal economic decline, as well as gender and socialisation effects are the most relevant explanatory variables. However, some of our findings – the importance of right‐wing economic policy preferences, the strong support by certain immigrant groups, and the role of the long‐term regional political context – stand out and distinguish the AfD from other Western European PRRPs.
“…Immigrants supporting a party known for its anti‐immigrant programme might at first seem counterintuitive, but recent analysis indicates that immigrants from Russia and some former states of the Soviet Union – the so‐called ‘late re‐settlers’‐ show disproportionally high levels of support for the AfD (Goerres et al. ). While we have no information on the respondents’ country of origin in our data, we strongly expect that AfD support is strongest among the group of Russian‐speaking immigrants with German citizenship, as AfD advertises widely among this voter group, for instance with an election manifesto written in Russian.…”
Using data from a recent nationwide survey, we provide the first analysis of the supporter base of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) since the party's split and ideological re‐orientation in mid‐2015. Hypotheses are derived from the literature on Populist Radical Right Parties (PRRPs) in Western Europe. Our findings indicate that AfD support—despite the party's euro crisis origins and rapid organizational and ideational changes—is by now due to largely the same set of socio‐economic, attitudinal and contextual factors proven important for PRRP parties elsewhere. Right‐wing political attitudes concerning immigration, political distrust, fears of personal economic decline, as well as gender and socialisation effects are the most relevant explanatory variables. However, some of our findings – the importance of right‐wing economic policy preferences, the strong support by certain immigrant groups, and the role of the long‐term regional political context – stand out and distinguish the AfD from other Western European PRRPs.
“…In the case of Russian Germans, ethnic group and national identity should be largely congruent, as the ethnic group encompasses those who are ethnic Germans from the East, a subgroup of all Germans. This would make national identity not as inclusive as for the Turkish group but more exclusively focused on the ethnic German part (Goerres, Mayer, & Spies, 2020). H2b : We thus expect national identity among Russian Germans to be associated with less hostility towards the majority population and associated with more hostility towards the two immigrant outgroups.…”
One of the major drivers of societal conflict are the intergroup relations which rely mainly on social identity and which are rarely analyzed for immigrant groups. This article changes this point of view by investigating the extent to which national, ethnic, and religious identities relate to outgroup hostilities towards the majority of the German population, towards other immigrant groups, and towards Syrian refugees among immigrant‐origin citizens. We employ a theoretical framework based on the social identity approach and use new representative survey data from 2017 for Germans of Turkish descent (N = 480) and Russian Germans (N = 471). Based on multivariate linear regression analysis, we show that ethnic identity has the strongest positive relation with outgroup hostilities, with the exception of the Russian‐Germans' evaluation of the German majority population. National identity among Germans of Turkish descent lessens their hostility towards other immigrants. Our results show the importance of analyzing immigrant groups with different migration trajectories separately before making generalized claims. Not only are the identity relations different between an ingroup identification and various outgroup targets, but they are also different between the immigrant groups for the same ingroup identification and outgroup target.
“…4). In Germany, for example, Goerres and coauthors show that the group of so-called 'ethnic' Germans expressed to a large extent sceptical stances regarding the influx of refugees and asylum seekers during the 2017 Bundestag election campaign (Goerres, Mayer, and Spies 2018). Therefore, although there may be some overlap between immigrant-origin citizens' interests and attention to the issue of refugee and asylum, it is nevertheless instrumental to refer to these as two different dimensions of immigration politics, with the latter being the focus of this study.…”
Section: What Makes Legislators Take the Parliamentary Floor To Speak About Immigration?mentioning
Immigration-related speechmaking in a party-constrained parliament: evidence from the 'refugee crisis' of the 18th German Bundestag (2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017) The 18th Bundestag term was marked by a high salience of the refugee and asylum issue dominating the political agenda. Taking this context as a case study, this paper asks which factors make legislators talk about immigration on the parliamentary floor. Three different literatures provide different answers to this question. A first literature highlights that immigrant-origin legislators with a visible background may have intrinsic motives to talk about immigration. A second literature raises attention to legislators' personal vote-seeking incentives to talk about immigration when the issue is electorally decisive. Contrary to these first two literatures, a third literature posits that legislative debates do not provide legislators the leeway to follow individual motives on the parliamentary floor, but that parliamentary party groups (PPGs) control access to the parliamentary floor and thus follow own strategies when allocating floor time to speak about the immigration issue. To examine this puzzle of competing expectations, a corpus of more than 10,000 speeches is leveraged, utilising a structural topic model, a novel method of quantitative text analysis. Results suggest that legislators' speech attention to the refugee and asylum issue in the 18th Bundestag was mainly shaped by PPG specific factors rather than by their individual motives.
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