Do Anti-immigration Voters Care More? The Immigration Issue Importance Asymmetry

• In Event: The Politics of Migrant Visibility and Invisibility

Abstract

Why do politicians and policymakers not prioritize pro-immigration reforms even when public opinion on the issue is positive? This research note empirically assesses one possible behavioral explanation of this puzzle related to the systematically greater perception of immigration as an important issue among those voters who oppose it (relative to those who support it). Although both anti-immigration and pro-immigration advocates can be extremely motivated by their cause, it is striking that, while there have been many prominent single-issue political parties and politicians with an anti-immigrant platform across the world, there have been none with a predominantly pro-immigration platform. But despite the fact that any account of immigration politics must make an assumption about whether immigration preferences are equally important to all voters, there has been so far no empirical evidence on this question.

To remedy this omission, I provide the first comprehensive empirical assessment of the relationship between personal issue importance (PII) of immigration to voters and their preferences on the issue across various immigrant-receiving contexts. First, I use multiple cross-sectional samples of the American National Election Studies (ANES) and the British Election Study (BES) for the baseline test of a potential positive correlation between anti-immigration preferences and the perception of immigration as the most important national problem or issue. After establishing the expected issue importance asymmetry in the major US and UK election surveys, I utilize the Transatlantic Trends Survey (TTS) and show that this asymmetry similarly extends to all other major immigrant-receiving countries. I then use the additional BES, Voter Study Group (VSG), and Eurobarometer data to establish that this asymmetry holds regardless of the particular survey instrument. Finally, I compare the relationship between PII and preferences in immigration to that of other political issues and political interest in general using the Cooperative Election Study (CCES), indicating that the revealed asymmetry is rather unique to immigration. In sum, I find that--compared to those who support immigration--those who oppose immigration feel stronger about the issue and much more likely to consider it as both personally and nationally important across virtually all observed countries, years, and alternative survey measures.

Overall, these results suggest that pro-immigration preferences as observed in public opinion surveys may often be not as meaningful as anti-immigration preferences in terms of people's behavioral or cognitive engagement with the issue and their willingness to vote based on it. While the exact causes and consequences of this asymmetry are beyond the scope of this research note, these results also imply that public attitudes toward immigration exhibit a substantial issue importance asymmetry that systematically advantages anti-immigration causes when the issue is more contextually salient (in a particular country or time).

Author

• Alexander Kustov, University of North Carolina at Charlotte