Voted In, Standing Out: Public Response to Immigrants' Political Accession

Abstract

In a context of nativism and poor representation of immigrant-origin ethnic minorities, what is the reaction of the host society when immigrants succeed at integration in political institutions? Building on threat theory—which links minorities’ political power to hostility against minoritized groups—we argue that when they win political office, immigrants pose a threat to natives’ dominant position. This in turn triggers a hostile reaction from a violent-prone fringe, the mass public and the elites. We test these dynamics across the last four UK general elections, using hate crime police records, public opinion data, and text data from over 500,000 news articles from 350 national and local newspapers. We identify the public’s hostile reactions with a regression discontinuity design that leverages close election results between minority-immigrant and dominant group candidates. Our findings suggest a public backlash against ethnic minority immigrants’ integration into majority settings.

Turnout Turnaround: Ethnic Minority Victories Mobilize White Voters

“…Using official electoral returns from four U.K. general elections and an RDD, we show that when minority candidates narrowly win, members of the dominant ethnic group increase their participation in subsequent elections, arguably to restore symbolic and political power. This result is consistent with findings by Grossman and Zonszein (2022), who show that minority electoral victories can lead to increased hostility among white voters. Our results are also consistent with Jardina (2019, chap.…”

“…However, less attention has been paid to the role that increased minority representation plays in shaping the political behavior of members of the majority dominant group. With few exceptions (e.g., Gay 2001;Keele and White 2019), past work has focused on the effects of minority representation on majority-group members' attitudes toward racial minorities (Jardina 2019) and immigrants (Grossman and Zonszein 2022), and on violent backlash (Jacobs and Wood 1999). In this letter, we assess instead the effects of minority representation on majority-group members' non-violent political response, in the form of turnout and vote choice.…”

Turnout Turnaround: Ethnic Minority Victories Mobilize White Voters

“…Using the case of four UK general elections and an RDD, we show that when minority candidates win competitive elections, members of the dominant ethnic group respond by increasing their participation in subsequent elections, arguably to restore political and symbolic power. This result is consistent with findings by (10) who show that minority electoral victories can lead to increased hostility among white voters who feel threatened by the change in political context. Our findings are also consistent with (9, ch.…”

“…With few exceptions (e.g. 7,8), past work has focused on the effects of minority representation on majority-group members' attitudes towards racial minorities (9) and immigrants (10), and on violent backlash (11). In this article we assess instead the effects of minority representation on majority-group members' non-violent electoral response (in the form of turnout and vote choice).…”

Hate crime supporters are found across age, gender, and income groups and are susceptible to violent political appeals

“…Additionally, this paper provides the individual-level foundations on which studies about the incidence of hate crime rest. Research associates structural factors such as demographic shifts ( 18 , 19 ), economic competition ( 9 , 20 ), or minority political power ( 21 – 23 ) with hate crime. Other work highlights situational triggers involving minorities as perpetrators ( 24 – 26 ) or the demonizing of minorities in relation to public events, such as Brexit ( 27 ) or the COVID-19 pandemic ( 28 , 29 ).…”