The Electoral Success of the Radical Right in Europe: The Importance of Immigration Revisited

Immigration or the percentage of foreigners is the most widely used structural variable in models explaining the vote share for radical right-wing parties in Europe. However, there is no consensus in the literature on how the percentage of immigrants or foreigners per geographical unit relates to the electoral success for anti-immigrant parties. In this article, I show that the divergent findings might stem from an ecological fallacy problem. I highlight that it is not the structural data on the percentage of immigrants, which is used by most of the literature, but perceptions of immigration that trigger increased support for the radical right. To undergird this result, I engage in a three step analysis. In a first step, I combine ESS data on individual perceptions of immigrants for more than 25,000 individuals with macro level data on the actual percentage of immigrants across 200 European Nuts 2 regions. In a second step, I use a correlation analysis to show that individual opinions on immigrants are unrelated with the hard data. In a third step, I highlight in a multivariate framework, that it is only the individual perception of immigration indicator that is significantly and positively related to higher electoral support for anti-immigrant parties.