Anti‐immigrant Parties in Europe: Ideological or Protest Vote?

Abstract

In this article we address the question whether or not the votes for anti-immigrant parties can be considered as protest votes. We define protest votes by the motives underlying electoral choices, building on earlier research done by Tillie (1995) and . That research showed that ideological proximity and party size are the best predictors of party preference. On this basis we designed a typology of motives for party choice and how these motives would manifest themselves empirically. Analyzing the 1994 elections for the European Parliament for seven political systems we show that anti-immigrant parties attract no more protest votes than other parties do, with only one exception: the Dutch Centrumdemocraten. Voting for anti-immigrant parties is largely motivated by ideological and pragmatic considerations, just like voting for other parties. In addition, (negative) attitudes towards immigrants have a stronger effect on preferences for anti-immigrant parties than on preference for other parties. Social cleavages and attitudes towards European unification are of minor importance as determinants of preferences for anti-immigrant parties. The overall conclusion is that a rational choice model of electoral behavior has strong explanatory power for party preferences in general, but also for the support for anti-immigrant parties in particular.

Nationalistic attitudes and voting for the radical right in Europe

“…First, researchers studied the role of attitudes towards migrants and integration (e.g. Ivarsflaten, 2005Ivarsflaten, , 2008Norris, 2005;Rydgren, 2008;Van der Brug et al, 2000) and second, studies turned to the role of euro-scepticism (e.g. Werts et al 2012).…”

‘Sexually modern nativist voters’: do they exist and do they vote for the populist radical right?

“…Ivarsflaten 2008;Norris 2005;Rydgren 2008;Van der Brug, Fennema, and Tillie 2000). This finding is commonly explained through realistic conflict theory, which suggests that migrants and natives are in competition over scarce resources (Coser 1956;Rydgren 2007), whereby natives are considered to be the out-group, threatening the material resources of the in-group and a threat to dominant cultural norms (McLaren 2003;Schneider 2008), often referred to as symbolic threat (Stephan and Stephan 2000).…”

How protest voters choose

“…The third point is that the political 'elite' must be understood in relation to the electoral system in a given country (Kang, 2004). Studies which have maintained that voting for far right parties is not a protest vote have largely been carried out in European states with proportional representation electoral systems (van der Brug et al, 2000;van der Brug, 2003).…”

“…Van der Brug, Fennema and Tillie (2000) find that the supporters of right-wing anti-immigrant parties tend focus on the issue of immigration to the (relative) exclusion of socio-economic and other issues. The same may be true of other protest voters also -they may respond to especially salient issues with which they identify antiestablishment parties.…”