Does the immigration issue divide the left’s attitudes towards social welfare? A study on public support of social benefits and services in the Nordic countries

PurposeThe paper presents a study on whether citizens’ immigration attitudes shape their attitudes towards social welfare in three Nordic countries.Design/methodology/approachThe main analysis was performed using linear regression analysis. Data were retrieved from the eighth round of the European Social Survey (2016). The data cover the Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish respondents (N = 5,021).FindingsThe analyses indicate that citizens’ immigration attitudes are associated with their social welfare attitudes. The more positive the attitudes towards immigration are, the more positive the attitudes toward social welfare will be. Further, people in the political Left have more positive attitudes towards social welfare compared to those in the political Right; but, the immigration issue is more divisive of the political Left’s opinion than that of the Right.Research limitations/implicationsPublic opinion research has its limitations because behind an individual’s opinion there are many hidden factors. An individual may also have different opinions depending on the dimensions of the welfare state.Social implicationsIf the immigration issue reduces the support for social welfare among the political Left, it may reduce the legitimacy of the Nordic social policy because the support of the political Left has traditionally been in favour of the universal principles of the welfare state.Originality/valueThe association of the immigration issue and social welfare attitudes has been broadly studied; but, the interaction of the immigration issue and political opinion on social welfare attitudes is less studied.

Between Numbers and Political Drivers: What Matters in Policy-Making

This chapter aims to investigate whether (restrictive) policy measures on migration across seven European countries (the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Italy, Switzerland and the UK) are better explained by political factors, rather than the actual number of migrants/refugees/asylum seekers, their integration process or the effective European societies’ demographic and economic needs, within each national context. The analysis shows, indeed, that restrictive legislative and policy measures on immigration and integration issues seem to be not justified by the reality of immigration in the selected European countries. Conversely, these restrictive measures can be explained by some relevant political factors: prevalence of negative attitudes towards immigration among European citizens and salience of the immigration issue; electoral relevance of populist radical-right parties who mostly mobilized on immigration issues and significant diffusion of their authoritarian/traditionalist/nationalist positions within each country’s party system. These data confirm that citizens’ perceptions and party systems’ features are closely related phenomena, which influence one another and are all key factors that need to be considered to explain the law and policy-making of recent years on immigration issues.

The Immigration Issue in the Field of Sociological Research

Concerns about continuous migration flows in recent decades have been politically adequately communicated globally by European politics. However, no European country has developed a social policy with appropriate precautionary measures to address logistical and political-cultural problems arising from the movement of large numbers of displaced people, problems that concern not only the host countries but also the countries of origin of immigrants. And although discussions at the level of studies on the immigration problem and its effects on the dominant culture have started too early, there is still a lack of research on the cultural side of migration and its implications for the political cultures of the host countries. Only isolated cases of reactions and discussions about the immigration policy of countries that welcome immigrants can be found in the literature. The present study first describes the situation that has been developed in Greece and Europe in the last five years by the increased number of refugees and migrants, which began to arrive, mainly through the Mediterranean, in Greece with a distant destination in the countries of Central and Northern Europe. Moreover, the study focuses on the areas of research that science needs to explore and study, in order for European policy to draw the necessary elements to formulate a strategic policy for the integration of migrants in host countries.

Polarization of Climate Politics Results from Partisan Sorting: Evidence from Finnish Twittersphere

Prior research shows that public opinion on climate politics sorts along partisan lines. However, they leave open the question of whether climate politics and other politically salient issues exhibit tendencies for issue alignment, which the political polarization literature identifies as among the most deleterious aspects of polarization. Using a network approach and social media data from the Twitter platform, we study polarization of public opinion toward climate politics and ten other politically salient topics during the 2019 Finnish elections as the emergence of opposing groups in a public forum. We find that while climate politics is not particularly polarized compared to the other topics, it is subject to partisan sorting and issue alignment within the universalist-communitarian dimension of European politics that arose following the growth of right-wing populism. Notably, climate politics is consistently aligned with the immigration issue, and temporal trends indicate that this phenomenon will likely persist.

A Historical Perspective on the Conditions for the Rise of Far-Right Parties in Scandinavia

SummarySubject and purpose of work: This article analyzes the factors depicted in the literature as essential for the emergence of far-right parties and assesses the importance of unemployment, immigration and political establishments in the failures of the far-right wing parties in Sweden and Finland in early 2000s.Materials and methods: Multi-methods approach is used in this study including case studies and a novel technique based on Boolean algebra.Results: The findings of this paper lead to the conclusion that the correlation between unemployment rates and the electoral strength of far-right parties is weak and does not support simplistic thesis such as high unemployment leads to extremism. Moreover, despite objectively favorable conditions in terms of high immigration rates, the presence of non-European immigrants in a country does not in itself explain the emergence of far-right parties.Conclusions: The study points to the importance of political factors such as the differences between the mainstream parties and tackling the immigration issue by the Liberal Party in Sweden and the wide ideological span of the coalition government and the role of Finland’s special relationship with the USSR that militated against the emergence of far-right parties in these countries.

Partisanship and perceived threats about immigration

What types of fears does immigration trigger in individuals and how do these fears differ across partisan lines? Prior research explores this question indirectly by linking immigration attitudes to respondents’ demographics or to different threat frames. This research note offers a more direct test by designing a randomized experiment on a nationally representative sample of US citizens. I provide one half of the respondents with neutral information about immigration, while the other half serves as the control group. I find that respondents for whom the immigration issue is made salient (i.e. the treatment group) are more fearful of both their personal as well as national economic situation and about crime in their community than respondents in the control group. I further find that the overall effects are mainly driven by those respondents who self-identify as Republicans.

The Immigration Issue in the European Electoral Campaign in the UK: Text-Mining Public Debate from Newspapers and Social Media

In recent years, the issue of immigration has become increasingly salient in the UK political and media debate. Moreover, with the development and persistence of the economic and financial crisis within the EU, immigration has been linked to growing opposition and criticism towards the European Union. In a country in which Euroscepticism has historically been high compared to countries in continental Europe, EU immigration-related statements connected to EU free-border agreements became more widespread. For this reason, we expect immigration to be a prominent issue in the electoral campaign of the upcoming 2014 European Parliament elections in the media. By covering EU immigrants and EU immigration issues in a certain way, media tend to promote or restrain certain ideas of immigration, that might eventually affect public’s views. In fact, we know from previous studies that immigration, particularly in times of economic crisis, is a challenge for society that can be framed not only in positive or negative terms, but also in economic or cultural terms.This study first considers the salience of coverage of EU immigrants and EU immigration issues in UK newspapersin the three months preceding the EU elections of May 2014. It further explores whether news coverage of different newspapers is framed in terms of economic or cul-tural terms. In addition, we mine information from social media to discover how the immigration debate is framed by politically engaged members of the public on these platforms.

The Role of NGOs in Search and Rescue Operations in the Context of the European Union Migration Crisis

In the early 2010s due to the aggravation of the situation in the Middle East and North Africa, the European Union faced an unprecedented escalation of the migration problem, which put serious pressure on many EU mechanisms. The article analyzes Brussels’ response to the increase in the number of victims in the Mediterranean Sea during the migration crisis, which peaked in 2015. The adoption of new initiatives that were aimed at easing the immigration issue did not lead to the expected results. The EU struggled to cope with a rise in the number of migrants who sought to reach European shores. The real challenge for the arriving migrants was crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Amid the increase in unmanaged flows of refugees and regular shipwrecks that led to the death of many migrants, non-governmental organizations stepped out. The organization and conduct of search and rescue operations (SARs) by NGOs led to the emergence of a new type of SARs, non-state ones, since even large NGOs began to conduct such operations for the first time. The article examines the contribution of European non-governmental organizations to the provision of search and rescue operations, as well as analyzes the main problems and challenges that these NGOs faced while implementing such activities from 2014 to 2020. It is concluded that European non-governmental organizations have saved tens of thousands of lives of migrants and refugees, thus becoming an important element in the EU’s migration crisis settlement. At the same time, they faced a number of problems and challenges, including criticism from some EU member states, which considered the activities of NGOs as a pull-factor for new migrants.

IMMIGRATION AND THE CONTEXT OF BREXIT: COLLOCATE NETWORK AND MULTIDIMENSIONAL FRAMEWORKS APPLIED TO APPRAISAL IN SFL

This article aims to discuss how three conservative UK newspapers (The Sun, The Telegraph and The Daily Star) represent the immigration issue during the days that preceded Brexit. The theoretical framework is based on Systemic-Functional Linguistics (appraisal system) and Corpus Linguistics (factor and collocates analysis). Collocates and network representation were calculated using two programmes (COWO and Gephi), and factor analysis and concordancing were based on R programming language. The results reveal a series of evaluation strategies related to immigrants and to the UK government and its policies. It was also possible to calculate how such strategies co-occur in the texts, obtaining a profile of the newspapers in terms of the most present dimensions and also of which strategies co-occur during instantiation