Voting about immigration policy: What does the Swiss experience tell us?

Florence Miguet Heimlicher

European Journal of Political Economy, 2008, vol. 24, issue 3, 628-641

Abstract: This paper draws on Swiss direct democracy to review the Swiss experience with immigration, which has been shaped strongly by regular voting on immigration policies. Relying on two unique post-vote data-sets on how Swiss citizens voted on initiatives directed at containing the proportion of foreigners in the population, we improve on past empirical evidence by by-passing the problem of "hypothetical bias" present in the analysis of conventional survey data. Controlling for the participation bias due to non-mandatory voting, we find evidence that the hypothetical bias hampering pre-vote surveys may be large but that turnout does not have a decisive influence on the outcome of a vote. Confirming political-economy predictions, education matters in the shaping of immigration preferences but non-economic arguments also play an important role.

Date: 2008
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:poleco:v:24:y:2008:i:3:p:628-641

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