Skill of the Immigrants and Vote of the Natives: Immigration and Nationalism in European Elections 2007-2016 / Simone Moriconi, Giovanni Peri, Riccardo Turati.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Moriconi, Simone.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Peri, Giovanni.

Turati, Riccardo.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w25077.

NBER working paper series no. w25077

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Skill of the Immigrants and Vote of the Natives

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2018.

Summary:

In this paper we document the impact of immigration at the regional level on Europeans' political preferences as expressed by voting behavior in parliamentary or presidential elections between 2007 and 2016. We combine individual data on party voting with a classification of each party's political agenda on a scale of their "nationalistic" attitudes over 28 elections across 126 parties in 12 countries. To reduce immigrant selection and omitted variable bias, we use immigrant settlements in 2005 and the skill composition of recent immigrant flows as instruments. OLS and IV estimates show that larger inflows of highly educated immigrants were associated with a change in the vote of citizens away from nationalism. However the inflow of less educated immigrants was positively associated with a vote shift towards nationalist positions. These effects were stronger for non-tertiary educated voters and in response to non-European immigrants. We also show that they are consistent with the impact of immigration on individual political preferences, which we estimate using longitudinal data, and on opinions about immigrants. Conversely, immigration did not affect electoral turnout. Simulations based on the estimated coefficients show that immigration policies balancing the number of high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants from outside the EU would be associated with a shift in votes away from nationalist parties in almost all European regions.

Notes:

Print version record

September 2018.