EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Skill of the Immigrants and Vote of the Natives: Immigration and Nationalism in European Elections 2007-2016

Simone Moriconi, Giowanni Peri and Riccardo Turati
Additional contact information
Giowanni Peri: University of California, Davis

No 2018-EQM-02, Working Papers from IESEG School of Management

Abstract: In this paper we document the impact of immigration at the regional level on Europeans’ political preferences as expressed by voting behavior in parliamentary or presidential elections between 2007 and 2016. We combine individual data on party voting with a classification of each party’s political agenda on a scale of their "nationalistic" attitudes over 28 elections across 126 parties in 12 countries. To reduce immigrant selection and omitted variable bias, we use immigrant settlements in 2005 and the skill compo- sition of recent immigrant flows as instruments. OLS and IV estimates show that larger inflows of highly educated immigrants were associated with a change in the vote of citizens away from nationalism. How- ever the inflow of less educated immigrants was positively associated with a vote shift towards nationalist positions. These effects were stronger for non-tertiary educated voters and in response to non-European immigrants. We also show that they are consistent with the impact of immigration on individual political preferences, which we estimate using longitudinal data, and on opinions about immigrants. Conversely, immigration did not affect electoral turnout. Simulations based on the estimated coefficients show that immigration policies balancing the number of high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants from outside the EU would be associated with a shift in votes away from nationalist parties in almost all European regions.

Keywords: Immigration; Nationalism; Elections; Europe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2018-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-eur, nep-int, nep-mig, nep-pol and nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (37)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ieseg.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/2018-EQM-02.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Skill of the immigrants and vote of the natives: Immigration and nationalism in European elections 2007–2016 (2022) Downloads
Working Paper: Skill of the immigrants and vote of the natives: Immigration and nationalism in European elections 2007–2016 (2022) Downloads
Working Paper: Skill of the Immigrants and Vote of the Natives: Immigration and Nationalism in European Elections 2007-2016 (2018) Downloads
Working Paper: Skill of the Immigrants and Vote of the Natives: Immigration and Nationalism in European Elections 2007-2016 (2018) Downloads
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:ies:wpaper:e201713

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from IESEG School of Management Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lies BOUTEN ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:ies:wpaper:e201713