The Cost of Ideological Learning: How Migrants Penalise Green Parties

• In Event: Political Identities, Contemporary Issues, and Public Opinion

Abstract

Progressive parties frequently hold the most pro-immigration stances, but struggle to gather electoral support from certain immigrant groups. Why is that? In this paper, we study the behaviour of migrants in Europe and their support for a growing progressive party family: Green parties. Descriptively, we find that, when compared to immigrants from established democracies, immigrants from (post-) authoritarian contexts are far less likely to support green parties across Western European countries. We suggest that these patterns are likely due to the costs of learning new ideological stances: As the politics of (post-) authoritarian contexts revolve less around green issues, environmental politics and policies are less salient for those who were socialised there, which makes them less likely to support these parties post-immigration. Testing these arguments by combining panel surveys from Germany and employing entropy balancing as a pre-processing method, we find support for our argument. These results have important implications for our understanding of how cultural norms travel across different political contexts and of the socialisation effects of political institutions.

Authors

• Korinna O. Lindemann, MZES, University of Mannheim

• António Valentim, London School of Economics and Political Science