The positions mainstream left parties adopt on immigration

Abstract

Immigration is often perceived as a political topic that overlaps traditional ideological cleavages. Much research has focused on the positions of the extreme right, and little research has examined mainstream parties and their public stances on immigration. This shortcoming hampers broader understanding of political competition on this issue. Drawing on a political claims analysis of 7 countries between 1995 and 2009, we present the salience, position and overall coherence of claims made by mainstream parties on immigration control and immigrant integration. Mainstream left parties adopt a more positive/expansive position on immigration and exhibit higher levels of coherence than centrist and right-wing parties. We also show that the impact of extreme-right parties (ERP) on the political claims of mainstream left parties seems to be limited. Our conclusions highlight that immigration does not necessarily constitute a crosscutting cleavage across mainstream left parties: Their ideological preferences remain aligned with their positive/liberal discourse on immigration control and immigrant integration.

Why do parties support emigrant voting rights?

“…A similar observation has been made for centre-right parties (Bale, 2003). Other studies dispute this argument saying that ideology remains the best predictor of positioning on migration issues among left-wing parties (Carvalho and Ruedin, 2018).…”

Politicising immigration in times of crisis: empirical evidence from Switzerland

“…Again, it makes sense to highlight the link between the crises and the immigrant context. Because the labour migrants of the 1970s were in a quite vulnerable situation, their traditional champions (civil society organisations and centre-left parties, see Carvalho and Ruedin 2018;Katzenstein 1987) saw themselves forced to speak out in their favour. With the future of several hundreds of thousands at stake, public action became a necessity and previously hesitant actors were pushed to take a clear position.…”

The rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU – Still an agenda-setter?

“…In particular, it is likely that left-wing governments attach more salience to issues associated with the key policy areas of their domestic platforms, namely civil rights, employment, environment and social protection (Seeberg, 2017) – I identify these areas as the ‘social and environmental’ policy cluster. Conversely, right-wing governments are likely to attach more salience to issues associated with the key policy areas of their own constituencies, namely migration (Carvalho and Ruedin, 2018), defence, internal market and international trade (Seeberg, 2017) – identified as the ‘economic and security’ policy cluster. H2b: Left-wing governments will attach more salience than right-wing governments to policy areas in the social and environmental cluster. H2c: Right-wing governments will attach more salience than left-wing governments to policy areas in the economic and security cluster.…”