Résultat de la recherche
Politicising immigration in times of crisis: empirical evidence from Switzerland
This article investigates the politicisation of immigration in Switzerland during two major socioeconomic crises: the oil crisis of the 1970s and the financial crisis of the late 2000s. Based on 2,853 newspaper claims from 1970 to 1976 and 1995 to 2018, we measure and compare differences in salience, polarisation, actor diversity and frame use between crisis and noncrisis periods. We find that while claims-making on immigration was indeed more salient, polarised, and diversified during the oil crisis, the empirical data for the financial crisis are inconclusive or show a slight decrease. Nonetheless, we still find a noteworthy increase in the use of identity frames during both periods. We conclude that while crises may influence claims-making about immigration and thus affect the politicisation of the matter, their contextual links to particular immigrant groups appear to be of importance as well. Crises do not increase politicisation automatically but may provide important opportunity structures that foster it.
A Foreigner Who Doesn’t Steal My Job: The Role of Unemployment Risk and Values in Attitudes towards Equal Opportunities
Immigration has become systematically politicized and opposed by many individuals. We examine individual attitudes towards equal opportunities for foreigners and Swiss citizens, using cross-sectional data from the Swiss Household Panel. Individuals with low levels of education tend to oppose foreigners, while the opposition by individuals with high levels of education increases with the risk of unemployment. Values and beliefs explain the negative attitudes of individuals with low levels of education, but not the association with the risk of unemployment for individuals with high levels of education. Clearly, both values and economic factors are important for explaining attitudes towards foreigners.
Estimating Party Positions on Immigration: Assessing the Reliability and Validity of Different Methods
We provide a systematic assessment of various methods to position political parties on immigration, a policy domain that does not necessarily overlap with left–right and is characterized by varying salience and issue complexity. Manual and automated coding methods drawing on 283 party manifestos are compared – manual sentence-by-sentence coding using a conventional codebook, manual coding using checklists, automated coding using Wordscores, Wordfish and keywords. We also use expert surveys and the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), covering the main parties in Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, between 1993 and 2013. We find high levels of consistency between expert positioning, manual sentence-by-sentence coding and manual checklist coding and poor or inconsistent results with the CMP, Wordscores, Wordfish and the dictionary approach. An often-neglected method – manual coding using checklists – offers resource efficiency with no loss in validity or reliability.
The role of social capital in the political participation of immigrants : evidence from agent-based modelling
Research commonly finds that immigrants are less likely to participate in politics than members of the mainstream society. The reasons for this difference are not well understood, and this paper uses agent-based modelling to examine participation in politics. Political participation is conceptualized in a more extensive way than the common focus on elections by including different levels of participation in a hierarchical manner. The simulation provides valid results, and it is suggested that social capital and contacts in the community may be a relevant mechanism to account for differences in political participation observed between immigrants and the mainstream society.
Electoral Participation of Immigrants: Why Do Immigrants Not Vote More Often When They Are Given the Opportunity?
Objective: Examine why immigrants are less likely to vote. Methods: A new representative dataset on the political participation of immigrants in the 2015 municipal elections in the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland is presented. It draws on questions from the Swiss Electoral Studies (Selects) and is enriched with questions relevant to immigrant origin. Logistic regression analysis with predicted probabilities is used to predict electoral participation. Results: Despite having the right to vote, most immigrant groups are less likely to vote than the majority population. Four explanations are tested for this gap in political participation: differences in social origin, political engagement, civic integration and networks, as well as socialization. Individually, all these explanations are associated with differences in political participation, but when all are tested at once, socialization ceases to be statistically significant. Conclusion: While it cannot account for the entirety of differences, social origin accounts for a large part of the different probabilities to vote between nationalities.