The Electoral Politics of Immigration and Crime

Jeyhun Alizade
Additional contact information
Jeyhun Alizade: WZB Berlin Social Science Center

No h967e, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Concern that immigration worsens crime problems is prevalent across Western publics. How does it shape electoral politics? Prior research asserted a growing left-right divide in immigration attitudes and voting behavior due to educational realignment. In contrast, I argue that leftist voters are more conservative on immigrant crime than leftist parties, which can drive highly-educated progressives (so-called `cosmopolitans') to right-wing parties. I demonstrate this voter-party mismatch using survey data from 14 Western European countries linked with expert ratings of party positions. A panel survey from Germany further shows that concern about immigrant crime increases vote intention for the center right among voters of the Greens – the party of leftist cosmopolitans. A conjoint experiment among German voters replicates this defection effect and shows that it persists even if the center right stigmatizes immigrants or adopts conservative socio-cultural issue positions. Repercussions of immigration can in fact drive leftist cosmopolitans to the right.

Date: 2024-04-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-eur, nep-int, nep-mig, nep-pol and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/661d0ca5219e716137f6a9bd/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:h967e

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/h967e

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF (contact@cos.io).