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Scapegoating: Unemployment, far-right parties and anti-immigrant sentiment

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Comparative European Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

Far-right parties blame immigrants for unemployment. We test the effects of the unemployment rate on public receptivity to this rhetoric. The dependent variable is anti-immigrant sentiment. The key independent variables are the presence of a far-right party and the level of unemployment. Building from influential elite-centered theories of public opinion, the central hypothesis is that a high unemployment rate predisposes citizens to accept the anti-immigrant rhetoric of far-right parties, and a low unemployment rate predisposes citizens to reject this rhetoric. The findings from cross-sectional, cross-time and cross-level analyses are consistent with this hypothesis. It is neither the unemployment rate nor the presence of a far-right party that appears to drive anti-immigrant sentiment; rather, it is the interaction between the two.

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Notes

  1. Legislative elections are counted only during presidential election years in the United States, they are counted only since 1991 in Portugal, and the two elections in Ireland in 1982 are counted as a single election. Our discussion here, and only here, takes into consideration the observation that many far-right parties did not begin as far-right parties. Thus, the Freedom Party (FPO) in Austria is not counted as a far-right party before the 1990 election (Betz, 1994; Riedlsperger, 1998). Similarly, the Progress Parties (FrP) in Denmark and Norway are not counted as far-right parties until the 1987 and 1989 elections, respectively (Svåsand, 1998; Andersen and Bjørklund, 2002). And the Swiss People's Party (SVP) is not considered a far-right party before the 1995 election (McGann and Kitschelt, 2005; Skenderovic, 2007). These transitions correspond in all cases to the adoption by these parties of an anti-immigration agenda that they had not previously promoted. In the ensuing analyses, however, we treat as far-right parties all political parties that eventually became far-right parties, regardless of the time-period under consideration. And we treat as ‘far-right countries’ all countries that have, or eventually acquired, a far-right party, regardless of the time-period under consideration. This decision allows us to avoid making consequential qualitative decisions about the precise moment at which a country acquired a far-right party. We prefer, instead, to assess the consequences of these kinds of cross-time changes as independent variables in our regression models.

  2. These data nonetheless include stocks of foreigners, rather than proportion of foreign-born, for Germany.

  3. More specifically, we code the percentage of the non-Anglo American and non-European immigrants as the percentage of the total national population in each country that was born outside of the European Economic Area, Switzerland, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. The data are provided by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (stats.oecd.org), and were derived from national censuses in and around the year 2000.

  4. ‘Level of education’ categories are used in lieu of ‘age completed education’ for New Zealand. These educational categories range from less than high school (1) to completed university (7). For all other countries, education is measured as ‘age completed’, ranging from less than 12 years of age (1) at the low end, to more than 20 years of age (10) at the high end.

  5. We impute missing values using STATA's MI IMPUTE command. We estimate the missing values for individual-level variables by using the logit method for the dichotomous variables (anti-immigrant sentiment and gender), the logit method for ordinal variables (political interest and education), and the regress method for age. Each of the imputation models includes all of the individual-level variables in the final regression model, as well as a series of dichotomous country variables. We do not include the contextual variables, which have no missing values, to estimate imputed values for missing individual-level observations. The final models use 10 imputations for each individual-level variable, but the graphics are constructed using only the first set of these imputations. There are 710 imputed values for the dependent variable, anti-immigrant, and there are 576 imputed values for age, 123 for female, 6129 for education, and, since the question was first asked in 1989, 592 imputed observations for political interest.

  6. We do not have enough observations on our country-level variables to estimate random slopes for our key variables of interest.

  7. Indeed, a higher unemployment rate is associated with lower levels of anti-immigrant sentiment in these countries for much of the past 30 years. More recently, however, this effect has dissipated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Political Science, University of Toronto, Scarborough, Canada

    Christopher Cochrane & Neil Nevitte

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  1. Christopher Cochrane
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  2. Neil Nevitte
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Appendices

Appendix A

Table A1

Table A1 Countries, waves and numbers of observations
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Appendix B

Table B1

Table B1 The impact of the standardized unemployment rate on anti-immigrant sentiment in countries with and without far-right parties
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Appendix C

Table C1

Table C1 The impact of the standardized unemployment rate on anti-immigrant sentiment, by year
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Appendix D

Table D1

Table D1 The effect of political interest on the relationship between the standardized unemployment rate and anti-immigrant sentiment, since 1989
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Cochrane, C., Nevitte, N. Scapegoating: Unemployment, far-right parties and anti-immigrant sentiment. Comp Eur Polit 12, 1–32 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2012.28

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