Political Economy Forum

Working Paper #2, Magistro and Wittstock

The rise and fall of anti-immigration parties in Italy: changes in immigration preferences and issue salience

Beatrice Magistro

Nicolas Wittstock

In many European countries, the recent electoral success of far-right parties coincided with increased immigration throughout the 2000s. While some have argued that these parallel trends suggest that immigration sours public opinion towards foreigners, a growing literature notes that immigration preferences remained stable. According to others, rising immigration activates related preferences politically, inducing people to vote based on their opinions on this issue. In this paper, we investigate the overlooked case of Italy, which has featured anti-immigration parties for decades. Using ITANES data, we find that immigration preferences remained stable throughout the 2000s but that the political salience of immigration varied considerably, closely tracking the anti-immigration vote. We find that anti-immigration voters are more likely to vote for an anti-immigrant party when immigration is a high- (rather than low-) salience issue to them, suggesting that issue-salience, rather than changing preferences drive the electoral success of the far-right in Italy.

 

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