Do anti-immigration and anti-EU positions go hand-in-hand when it comes to adopt legislation?
We argue that immigration and EU integration are qualitatively different dimensions, and shape legislative behaviour differently. We first explore the purported link between anti-immigration and anti-EU contents via supervised quantitative scaling of 111 legislative texts from the EU immigration acquis. We find no link between immigration restrictiveness and national sovereignty provisions, and this is true pre and post-2015 crisis, and under various other measures of economic and migration pressure. We then investigate EP roll call voting data on the dossiers - as well as ParlGov, CHES and Eurobarometer data - covering over 350 national parties and spanning two decades. We find that political parties readily trade-off their position on the EU dimension, while the immigration dimension is less `tradeable'. This is important evidence in favour of decoupling the second-dimension of political competition, and speaks to the importance of distinguishing between technical/grid and substantive issues.
Natascha Zaun is Professor of Public Policy at Leuphana University Lueneburg. Before coming to Luenburg, she was Associate Professor in Migration Studies at the European Institute of the LSE, after having worked there as Assistant Professor. Previously, she was a Junior Research Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford (Department of International Development) and a Postdoc at the University of Mainz. Natascha holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Bremen. She specializes in migration policymaking and migration politics, particularly in the context of the EU.
Miriam Sorace is currently a Political Data Scientist for the UK's Labour Party and a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Quantitative Politics at the University of Kent. She is a Visiting Researcher at the University of Oxford (DPIR), a Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics (Data Science Institute), and a Visiting Asst. Professor in Political Behaviour at Royal Holloway, University of London. Previously, she was an LSE Fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics and a Lecturer (Asst. Professor) in Comparative Politics at Swansea University. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Trinity College Dublin. Miriam specialises in electoral behaviour, political representation, motivated reasoning and information processing, democratic norms and attitudes, and the working of supranational democracy.
Sara Hobolt is the Sutherland Chair in European Institutions and Professor in the Department of Government, LSE. Previously, she has held posts at the University of Oxford and the University of Michigan. She is the Chair of the European Election Studies (EES), an EU-wide project studying voters, parties, candidates and the media in European Parliamentary elections. Sara has published extensively on elections, referendums, public opinion and European Union politics.