No Strong Anti-Immigrant Party Despite the Saliency of Immigration Issues. Explaining the British and the Spanish Case

Immigration has ascended to one of the most contentious issues in the advanced industrialized world, giving rise to intense political debates. In some countries this politicization of the immigration issue has affected whole party systems, leading to the breakthrough of anti-immigrant parties in national elections, while in others no such success of new challengers on the immigration issue occurred. Whereas the former has been extensively studied, the latter has received no or only little scholarly attention. Using manifesto and election studies data this paper proposes to investigate why in Britain and Spain, two countries where immigration is in fact highly politicized, in terms of both salience and polarization, anti-immigrant parties failed to succeed at the national level. The explanation suggested by this work is that the mainstream parties, particularly the center-right were able to successfully contain the anti-immigrant right by co-opting their platform. This strategy was enabled through electoral institutions which over-reward the established and most popular parties while discriminating against small and novel parties. Finally, it is argued that this movement to the right on the immigration issue, although not altering the party system, still introduced partisan change by firmly aligning anti-immigrant voters with the center-right, and migrants and their descendants with the center left. In Britain this development was particularly drastic, since the Conservative party transformed from being the party supporting the idea of citizenship rights for all Commonwealth citizens into being the party advocating resettlement and a complete halt to further immigration.