How Mainstream Party Position-Taking on Immigration Shapes Political Trust

TRUEDEM Webinar on November 28

Tough Positions, Trustful Voters? How Mainstream Party Position-Taking on Immigration Shapes Political Trust and its Impact on Far-Right Voting

Mainstream parties have taken increasingly restrictive immigration policy positions across Western Europe. Yet the political consequences of this behaviour for citizens' democratic norms and practices are still not well understood. This article focuses on public political trust. Bridging the literatures on immigration-related trust and spatial theory, the spotlight is put on the consequences of mainstream party position-taking on immigration for the interconnectedness of citizens' immigration policy preferences, political distrust and far-right voting. An analysis of data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and European Social Survey across 14 Western European democracies (2006–2018) suggests that tougher immigration positions of centre-right parties in government weaken the link between immigration scepticism and political distrust and, in turn, the relevance of political distrust as a precursor of far-right voting. This has important implications for our understanding of immigration politics and advances the existing literatures on party competition, political trust and far-right voting in several ways.

Lucas Geese is a Research Fellow in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and a member of both the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and ClimateUEA. His research focuses on questions of political representation, in particular the relationships between citizens and politicians, as well as how political actors engage with climate and immigration issues. At UEA, Geese is currently involved in the ERC‑funded project Deep Decarbonisation: The Democratic Challenge of Navigating Governance Traps, where he is exploring what makes political commitments to deep and rapid decarbonisation credible. Prior to this, he has held teaching and research roles in comparative politics, including at the University of Bamberg. His published work includes comparative studies on descriptive representation, immigrant-origin candidate voting, and the institutional constraints on substantive representation.