Do Personality Traits Impact Politicians’ Positions on Immigration?

• In Event: Opinion and Immigration

Abstract

Immigration is an important political issue in a large number of countries. The political debates spurred on by rapidly growing immigrant populations in many countries have resulted in an extensive, and growing, scholarship that seeks to explain citizens’ attitudes toward immigration (see Hainmueller & Hopkins 2014). Yet, and surprisingly, there is an absence of research regarding the factors that determine political elites’ positions on immigration. Understanding the views of politicians on important sociopolitical matters is all the more necessary as political elites are the ones who are responsible for developing and implementing immigration policies. This study therefore seeks to address an important scholarly gap by exploring the factors that help to explain politicians’ positions on immigration.

Specifically, we are inspired by the growing research into personality that underlines psychological traits as being important determinants for a wide variety of citizens’ sociopolitical attitudes, including attitudes towards immigration (Gallego & Pardos-Prado 2014). While research on the direct impact of personality traits on politicians’ views is scarce, the scholarship does nevertheless show that political elites’ personality can determine their political behavior (Greenstein 1998; Nai et al. 2019). We therefore ask: Do politicians’ personality traits impact their positions on immigration?

To answer this question, we utilize survey data from the 2010 Swedish Candidate Survey, which offers a large sample (≈ 1,500) of political candidates standing for election in the 2010 Swedish Parliamentary Election.

Sweden is an interesting case regarding immigration policies. In the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis, the center-right government of the time implemented a very welcoming and generous immigration policy that saw Sweden receive the largest per capita proportion of refugees of any European country. A few years later, a center-left government took a restrictive turn towards immigration. The recent immigration policies in Sweden are examples that underscore that partisanship and ideology are not enough to understand politicians’ attitudes towards immigration.

By moving beyond partisanship and ideology, this study allows to better understand the factors that lead politicians to support or oppose immigration.

Authors

• Mike Medeiros, University of Texas at Austin

• Patrik Ohberg, The Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg