Does political discourse matter? Comparing party positions and public attitudes on immigration in England
| Author | Peter Taylor-Gooby,Benjamin Leruth |
| Published date | 01 May 2019 |
| Date | 01 May 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0263395718755566 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
755566POL0010.1177/0263395718755566PoliticsLeruth and Taylor-Gooby
research-article2018
Article
Politics
2019, Vol. 39(2) 154 –169
Does political discourse matter?
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Comparing party positions and
htps:/doi.org/10.1177/0263395718755566
DOI: 10.1177/0263395718755566
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public attitudes on immigration
in England
Benjamin Leruth
University of Canberra, Australia
Peter Taylor-Gooby
University of Kent, UK
Abstract
The 2015 UK General Election campaign was mostly dominated by the issues of immigration,
public debt, and income inequality. While most political parties adopted austerity-led programmes
in order to reduce the level of public deficit, their stances on immigration vary significantly despite
the two main parties converging on a welfare chauvinist frame. This article compares party
positions to policy recommendations formulated by participants in a democratic forum as part of
the ‘Welfare States Futures: Our Children’s Europe’ project in order to determine whether recent
party pledges on immigration are being used by citizens in a large group discussion over the future
of welfare policy in the United Kingdom. The analysis shows that while participants are committed
to tougher policies in order to reduce existing levels of net migration, most of the policy priorities
formulated do not match those of the two mainstream parties (i.e. the Conservative Party and
the Labour Party) but rather those of the UK Independence Party (UKIP). It also demonstrates
that participants’ individual political preferences do not seem to match their own positions on
immigration and that there is little difference between left-leaning and right-leaning voters.
Keywords
democratic forum, immigration, party politics, public opinion, United Kingdom
Received: 22nd April 2017; Revised version received: 6th November 2017; Accepted: 20th December 2017
Introduction
The year 2015 marked the start of political change in the United Kingdom. After 5 years
of coalition government between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats under
Corresponding author:
Benjamin Leruth, Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT 2601,
Australia.
Email: Benjamin.Leruth@canberra.edu.au
Leruth and Taylor-Gooby
155
David Cameron, the Conservatives obtained the majority of seats following the general
election held on 7 May 2015. As a result, David Cameron formed a single party majority
government. The Conservatives were thus able to adapt their party manifesto into a gov-
ernment programme, which included a pledge to hold a referendum on European Union
(EU) membership (held on 23 June 2016, when 51.9% of voters opted for leaving the EU
after a campaign mostly focused on the issue of immigration); to cut down net migration
‘in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands’ (Conservative Party, 2015); and
to reform the welfare system while cutting down taxes.
While political discourse and party manifesto analyses have mostly focused on their
impact on policy-making (see, for example, Leruth, 2015; Schmidt, 2002) or on how
public opinion shapes party stances (e.g. Adams et al., 2004; Bale and Partos, 2014;
Hills, 2002; Norris and Lovenduski, 2004), few qualitative studies analysed the role of
party stances (or more broadly elite discourse) on public discourse (see, for example,
Slater, 2014).
This article explores whether political discourse and key statements formulated by
political parties are being used in discussions between ordinary people. Using data
from innovative democratic forums conducted within the framework of a New
Opportunities for Research Funding Agency Cooperation in Europe (NORFACE)-
funded project entitled ‘Welfare States Future: Our Children’s Europe’ (WelfSOC),
the article compares party positions (as laid out in their party manifestos) with policy
recommendations formulated by participants in our democratic forums. This article
focuses on the issue that was selected by our participants as the most urging challenge
for the future of the welfare state, namely, immigration. This issue was also heavily
discussed during the 2015 and 2017 General Election campaigns, and in the context
of the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign, as a majority of ‘Leave’ voters expressed
concerns over immigration (Hobolt, 2016). The second section of this article contex-
tualises the debate: based on the election campaign, it explains why immigration
constituted the core of the 2015 campaign and highlights the key stances taken by
political parties in England.1 The third section focuses on the research methods: it
explains the added value of democratic forums and why such method can help
researchers to understand how political discourse matters to ordinary citizens, by
analysing how it is being used in interactions within small and large groups. The
fourth section focuses on individual statements and policy recommendations formu-
lated by participants to our democratic forums and compares them to party positions
highlighted in the second section. The fifth and final section then concludes by stat-
ing that although a majority of democratic forum participants identified themselves
as Labour or Conservative voters and in the centre of the left–right political spectrum,
their position and policy recommendations on immigration matched those advocated
by the UK Independence Party (UKIP).
Party positions and public opinion on immigration: The
state of the art
Public attitudes towards immigration in the United Kingdom have been covered exten-
sively in the exiting literature, mostly drawing on data from the British Election Study
and the British Social Attitudes surveys (see, for example, Ford, 2011; Ford and Goodwin,
2014; MacLaren and Johnson, 2007 for surveys conducted by IPSOS MORI and see, for
example, Blinder, 2015; Duffy and Frere-Smith, 2014). The starting point of many
156
Politics 39(2)
existing studies is to deconstruct immigration into several groups, either per region of
origin (e.g. Ford, 2011) or, most commonly, by dissociating economic migrants from
refugees and asylum seekers (e.g. Blinder, 2015; Sales, 2002). Several studies have exam-
ined the relationship between political parties and public opinion. Two schools of thought
dominate the existing literature: a bottom-up approach, where studies have focused on
whether public opinion shapes party positions, and a top-down approach, examining the
influence of party ideology on public opinion.
Bottom-up approach
Bottom-up studies have analysed the effect that public opinion has on political parties.
In a comparative analysis of eight Western European countries, Adams et al. (2004:
608) used data from the Comparative Manifesto Project and Eurobarometer survey
data on citizens’ left–right self-placement to show that ‘political parties shift their
ideological positions in response to public opinion when opinion clearly shifts away
from the party’. They also found out that parties do not adjust their ideologies based
on past elections results. Schumacher et al. (2013) nuanced these findings, demon-
strating that party position change as a response to public opinion depends on the
party’s organisational balance of power. In a study of the evolution of the UK
Conservative Party’s immigration policy, Bale and Partos (2014: 616–617) highlighted
that although party leadership played the most significant role in shaping the party’s
stance over the five decades covered, changes in policy direction are in most cases
driven by ‘the need to respond to party and public feeling, whether it be triggered by
particular cases or by developing trends’. In a study of British New Labour between
1997 and 2002, Hills (2002) analysed whether the party’s new social security policy
was shaped by opinion surveys and focus groups, drawing on data from British Social
Attitudes survey. The author found out that for a significant list of social security
policy areas, New Labour’s stance has evolved in line with public opinion, while only
a minority of policies have been out of line with public attitudes. This indicates that
public opinion could have shaped social security policy, although Hills does suggest
that there might be other interpretations of his results.
According to Freeman’s (2002) analysis of the ‘gap’ between public opinion and public
policy in liberal democracies, the public tends to hold restrictive views on immigration, but
public opinion is ‘slower to mobilize and crystallize’ (Freeman, 1995: 884), while immi-
gration policy is shaped by an ‘overwhelmingly admissionist’ organised public consisting
of employers, ethnic advocacy groups, and human rights organisations, which form the
basis of the ‘organised public’. Yet, Freeman (1994) also argued that the United Kingdom
is a ‘deviant case’, given that until the election of a Labour government in 1997, immigra-
tion policy was restrictive in line with public opinion (see also Hampshire, 2009; Hansen,
2000; Statham and Geddes, 2006). Some scholars, however, claimed that such UK excep-
tionalism may be overstated (see, for example, Somerville and Goodman, 2010 for a
nuance between economic migration and asylum policy). In a recent analysis of immigra-
tion policy regimes using British Social Attitudes surveys, Ford et al.’s (2015: 1408) find-
ings suggest that public opinion and public policy are indeed interconnected:...
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