A New Threat: Political Competition, Partisanship, and Anti-Immigrant Backlash

• In Event: Experimental Approaches to Immigration Backlash Politics

Abstract

What factors lead to anti-immigrant backlash? The literature on anti-immigrant attitudes and behaviors is broad and often deep but has focused heavily on two areas with varying explanatory power and theoretical coverage. These two areas; cultural threat and economic threat; have been the subject of much work from cross-national surveys to formal theories and micro-foundational experimental work. This paper adds to this literature a focus on backlash as a result of the fear of the future impacts immigrants may have on political competition. The theory contends that the potential threat of immigrants for loss of political power, and the material and psychological goods that come from it, lead to greater anti-immigrant sentiment and anti-liberal immigration policy views depending on the partisanship of the citizen. A survey experiment is conducted that varies cues on group size and levels of competitiveness of recent elections while randomizing within partisan groups in order to gauge how these perceptions interact to create differing levels of anti-immigrant sentiment at the individual level.

Author

• Louis Jacob Wilson, University of Pittsburgh