How Immigration Reforms Affect Voting Behavior
| Published date | 01 August 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321717725485 |
| Date | 01 August 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717725485
Political Studies
2018, Vol. 66(3) 687 –717
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321717725485
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How Immigration Reforms
Affect Voting Behavior
Tarik Abou-Chadi1 and Marc Helbling2
Abstract
This article investigates how changes in immigration policies affect migration as a vote-defining
issue at upcoming elections. So far, the literature on issue voting has mostly focused on the role
of issue entrepreneurs in politicizing new issues. In this article, however, we introduce policy
change as a new potential determinant in the process of issue evolution. Moreover, in contrast to
most of the literature that investigates the role of policy outcomes (such as economic growth or
unemployment) on voting decisions, we analyze the effect of laws which can be directly attributed
to governments and political parties. We focus on within-country variation and analyze national
election surveys from the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany between 1994 and 2011. These
surveys include information on both self- and party-placements regarding immigration issues. To
measure policy changes, we use data on immigration policies from the newly built Immigration
Policies in Comparison dataset. While we expect a general reform effect, we investigate
in more detail whether liberal and restrictive reforms have a similar effect on votes for left/
right, government/opposition parties. It is shown that both liberal and restrictive reforms lead
to increasing issue voting. While we show that government parties are not more affected than
opposition parties, we see that party ideology partly plays a role.
Keywords
immigration policies, voting behavior, issue voting, political parties
Accepted: 10 July 2017
Introduction
Understanding how party positions affect individual voting behavior has become of
utmost importance as it has been shown that socio-structural factors have lost in explana-
tory power over the past decades (Alvarez et al., 2000; Dalton, 2002; Franklin, 1985). In
other words, the role that issue voting and issue competition more generally play for
electoral democracy has increased over the past years (Green-Pedersen, 2007) and to a
large extent has replaced other mechanisms of representation, such as class-voting. So far,
1Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
2University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany
Corresponding author:
Marc Helbling, University of Bamberg, Bamberg 96047, Germany.
Email: marc.helbling@uni-bamberg.de
725485PSX0010.1177/0032321717725485Political StudiesAbou-Chadi and Helbling
research-article2017
Article
688 Political Studies 66(3)
the literature on issue and retrospective voting has mostly focused on the roles of issue
entrepreneurs and policy outcomes, such as the state of the economy (De Vries, 2007; De
Vries and Giger, 2014; Duch and Stevenson, 2008; Powell and Whitten, 1993). We argue
in this article that policy reforms (i.e. concrete policies passed by a legislature) constitute
another and maybe even more relevant determinant in the process of issue evolution.
Contrary to policy outcomes, policy outputs can more clearly be attributed to political
actors that run for office.1 And contrary to policy entrepreneurs, policy outcomes do not
simply reflect what politicians argue but what has concretely been decided (Berry and
Howell, 2007; Seeberg et al., 2017: 351). This is particularly relevant as studies have
shown that citizens might not be aware of parties’ policy shifts (Green-Pedersen and
Mortensen, 2015).
We elaborate and empirically investigate three potential mechanisms for why and how
policy reforms should affect issue voting. First, reforms should affect issue voting because
they increase the overall salience and visibility of the specific issue. In the context of
political decisions and the implementation of policies, issues are widely debated among
political actors and the public arena. Accordingly, new regulations can more easily be
perceived and in turn shape individual voting decisions. Following from this logic, we
should expect reforms to affect all parties alike. Second, policy changes could affect issue
voting through a mechanism of accountability attribution. If this is the case, then issue
voting after reforms should be stronger for government than for opposition parties. Third,
the relationship between policies and issue voting could work through a partisan and issue
ownership mechanism. For this mechanism, we should expect to see differences between
parties based on their ideology or party family.
For a long time, migration issues have been debated behind closed doors mainly within
the bureaucracy (Guiraudon, 1998). Over the past two decades, however, there have been
increasing debates in the public arena and a growing interest in political solutions to cur-
rent problems associated with immigration. It has been shown that in many Western coun-
tries, concerns over immigration have had an increasing effect on vote choices especially
of right-wing populist parties (Ivarsflaten, 2007; Norris, 2005). Immigration has thus
become a crucial part of the new integration–demarcation cleavage in Western European
nation-states (Kriesi et al., 2008, 2012).
We should thus expect that voters have relatively clear expectations of how immigra-
tion issues should be regulated and that their vote choices depend on how these problems
are resolved as migration is often considered as one of the most pressing social problems.
While several studies assume that governments fear the wrath of voters when it comes to
liberalizing citizenship and immigration policies (Breunig et al., 2012; Howard, 2009),
we do not know whether government reforms do affect the role that immigration issues
play for vote choice. We thus investigate how liberal as well as restrictive changes in two
areas of immigration policy (labor market and family-related policies) affect issue voting
at the subsequent election.
To investigate the effect of policy reforms on immigration as a vote-determining issue,
we focus on within-country variation and analyze national election surveys from the
Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany between 1994 and 2011. These surveys include
information on both self- and party-placements regarding immigration issues. To measure
policy changes, we use data on immigration policy changes from the Immigration Policies
in Comparison (IMPIC) dataset (Helbling et al., 2017). It is shown that both liberal and
restrictive reforms lead to increasing issue voting. We do not find any differences for
government and opposition parties. While the effects are generally somewhat stronger for
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