Far-Right Government Support and Immigration

• In Event: Poster Session: International Political Economy 1 & Migration and Citizenship
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Migration and Citizenship

Abstract

How do citizens evaluate far-right governments in office? I conduct a survey experiment to study how immigration affects the support for a far-right government. The experiment, embedded in a representative survey of 2000 individuals in Italy, takes place in February 2024 and exposes different respondent groups to information regarding the government’s pledges and outcomes in immigration and economic growth. By examining the nuanced dynamics between policy pledges, outcomes, and voter responses, this research aims to shed light on the evaluation of far-right governments by the electorate.

Since the 1990s, the radical right has been increasingly coming to power in democracies, assuming government offices in Brazil, India, Israel, the United States and in a number of European countries: Austria, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, Sweden and Switzerland (Golder, 2016; Mudde, 2019). Meanwhile, a significant body of research has investigated what makes people vote for the far right (Colantone & Stanig, 2019; Guriev & Papaioannou, 2022; Margalit et al., 2022; Rodrik, 2021). Far-right parties have been scrutinized as the most recent large wave of political challengers, as opposed to dominant parties with government experience (De Vries & Hobolt, 2020). However, much less is known about how citizens hold accountable those far-right parties who ascend to power.

Once in office, a party is subject to an additional dimension of voter attitudes: accountability for past performance. Incumbents can expect credit or blame at least for those policy outcomes that are sufficiently salient for voters (De Vries & Giger, 2014). Immigration belongs to the most salient issues in Western democracies (Braun & Schaefer, 2022; De Vries & Hobolt, 2020; Neundorf & Adams, 2018) and is often attributed to the far right as their core issue (De Vries & Hobolt, 2020; Kitschelt, 2018). Far-right parties build their electoral support on anti-immigration grievances and policies (Dai & Kustov, 2023; Ivarsflaten, 2008). Growing immigration resonates with many voters, increasing the electoral support for the far right (Cools et al., 2021; Gessler et al., 2022; Hangartner et al., 2019; Tabellini, 2020; Tolsma et al., 2021). However, previous studies largely focused on the support for the far-right parties that were in opposition. Much less is known about the voter attitudes toward a radical right incumbent, in particular, in relation to the immigration outcomes. Based on this theoretical framework, I hypothesize the following:

Hypothesis 1: Exposure to information about increasing immigration erodes citizens’ attitudes towards the far-right government.

At the same time, research on accountability shows that citizens react to the non-fulfillment of pledges based on actual policy performance (Matthieß, 2022; Naurin et al., 2019; Thomson, 2011). I use Hypothesis 2 to test any explicit pledging effects on top of the accountability for past performance:

Hypothesis 2: Exposure to information about increasing immigration with a government’s pledge to curb it has a stronger effect on citizens’ attitudes towards the far-right government than only information about increasing immigration.

Hypotheses 3-5 consider individual differences in policy priorities, attitudes and political preferences: I hypothesize this effect to be more pronounced among those who consider immigration important, people who hold far-right attitudes and far-right party voters.

I empirically test these hypotheses through a survey experiment using textual and graphical vignettes. The experiment is a part of a survey scheduled for February 2024 in Italy, which is currently governed by the radical right. Sworn in October 2022, Giorgia Meloni’s majority government is led by a radical right Brothers of Italy party and includes the radical right League and a center-right Forza Italia, which has the least seats among the three. Thus, the cabinet is dominated by the radical right.

For the survey experiment, each participant is randomly assigned to one of four groups: Treatment Group 1, Treatment Group 2, Treatment Group 3, Control Group. Group 1 is shown statistical information on the rising migrant arrivals to Italy through the Mediterranean, Group 2 is shown the same statistics together with the government’s pledge to stop those arrivals, Group 3 is shown the Italian GDP growth statistics and the Control Group directly proceeds to the last part of the questionnaire without being shown any vignette. I will use the results from the control group to estimate the treatment effect and to compare the effects of alternative treatments above. The outcome questions include government approval, its perceived competence and the propensity to vote for the government parties.

The experiment has received IRB approval and funding and is scheduled to be conducted in February 2024.

Author

• Konstantin Bogatyrev, Bocconi University