Group-Threat Revisited: Ethnoracial Difference, Temporality, and Far-Right Voting in Sweden

• In Event: 2145 - Attitudes Towards Immigrants and the Construction of Citizenship

Abstract

Under what sets of societal conditions is anti-immigrant sentiment as expressed through far-right voting likely to strengthen and weaken, respectively? A country with a population of just under 10 million people, Sweden received one of the highest rates of asylum applications per capita in Europe during the “refugee crisis” of 2015/2016. Meanwhile, far-right anti-immigrant politics has surged in the country. This study uses the case of recent immigration to Sweden during the refugee crisis to assess the group-threat hypothesis, which posits that anti-immigrant sentiment is a form of prejudice that is driven by natives’ perception of immigrants as an economic, cultural, or political threat. Using aggregate-level contextual data between 2014 and 2018, I test whether the sudden increase in the proportion of immigrants in the municipal population is associated with a change in municipal-level anti-immigrant voting in national elections. In particular, I examine whether non-Western immigrants have a greater association with anti-immigrant voting than Western immigrants, and whether change over time is more indicative of voting outcomes than cross-sectional contextual effects. After running multiple OLS regressions with change-score modeling, results indicate both support of and areas for revision of the group-threat hypothesis. Change over time in the proportion of non-Western immigrants in the population has a strong positive association with change in anti-immigrant voting, while the change over time in Western immigrants has no significant effect. I argue that the findings indicate that the specific combination of temporal change and ethnoracially “other” immigrants awakens a particular ethnoracial anxiety among White natives, leading to heightened threat perceptions. I make the case for a theoretical revision of the group-threat hypothesis that centers temporal change as a key mechanism of threat perception and takes seriously the potential threat posed by ethnoracial difference, rather than just economic, cultural, or political competition.

Author

• Jenny J. Enos, Rutgers University