Tag: elections

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Party Positions on Immigration: Additional Data Released

I have updated the online supplement for our paper on party positions on immigration (with Laura Morales) to add more data, including data that I coded after the article was published. While the online supplement (PDF) of that article included party positions and packed lots of additional information on its 102 pages, there is now more on OSF.

You can find:

  • N=422 party manifestos coded using the checklist approach
  • N=9,147 individual sentences coded
  • N=461 sections on migration, manually selected
  • word counts of these sections on migration

Although I wish I could say that the data are complete, they are a mix from Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Some coverage is pretty systematic, other coverage is more selective — reflecting what I have worked on.

P.S. please don’t use the CMP/MARPOR codes 607 and 608 when you want to measure positions on immigration, they are too generic and do not correlate well. There are more specific sub-codes in data coded after 2014 that are conceptually fine.

Link to OSF

Hadj-Abdou, Leila, and Didier Ruedin. 2022. ‘The Austrian People’s Party: An Anti-Immigrant Right Party?’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 48(2):385–404. doi:10.1080/1369183X.2020.1853904

Ruedin, Didier. 2019. ‘South African Parties Hardly Politicise Immigration in Their Electoral Manifestos’. Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies. 46(2):206-18. doi:10.1080/02589346.2019.1608713

Ruedin, Didier and Laura Morales. 2019. “Estimating Party Positions on Immigration: Assessing the Reliability and Validity of Different Methods”. Party Politics. 25(3):303–14. doi:10.1177/1354068817713122

Ruedin, Didier. 2013. “The role of language in the automatic coding of political texts.” Swiss Political Science Review 19(4): 539-45. doi:10.1111/spsr.12050

Ruedin, Didier. 2013. “Obtaining party positions on immigration in Switzerland: Comparing different methods.” Swiss Political Science Review 19(1): 84-105. doi:10.1111/spsr.12018

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Racism in Switzerland? Yes.

Oddly enough we still seem to discuss whether there is racism in Switzerland. Yes, there is.

Here a few hard facts from the NCCR on the move.

  • Job applicants with Black skin colour on their picture and a name from Cameroon have to send 30% more job applications to get invited for a job interview. They are Swiss citizens. Blog.
  • Job applicants with a name indicating Kosovan ancestors have to send up to 50% more job applications to get invited for a job interview. They are Swiss citizens. Blog.
  • 18% of the Swiss population entitled to vote are of ‘immigrant origin’. In 2015, 13% of the candidates for the National Council had a name suggesting ‘immigrant origin’ — only 6% got elected. Blog.
  • If your name suggests Turkish or Kosovan ancestry, you’re 3-5 percentage points less likely to be invited to view an apartment: There are landlords who do not want to meet you. Blog.

We also have tons of material on the experience of discrimination, experiencing racism, or negative attitudes to immigrants and foreigners.

Image credit: CC-by-sa Quinn Dombrowski

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New publication: How South African Parties Do Not Politicize Immigration in Their Manifestos

I am happy to announce a new publication on how South African parties do not politicize immigration in their electoral manifestos, despite many indications that we can expect them to do so. In a country where xenophobia appears widespread, we can expect political parties to politicize immigration and take positions against immigrants.

In this paper, I wanted to do two things. On a methodological side, I wanted to know whether the approaches to coding electoral manifestos we have developed in the context of European parties works elsewhere. I have applied them to the US context, but South Africa would provide a tougher test. The keyword tests worked fine, and the qualitative discussions with colleagues were encouraging to press on. On a substantive side, I wanted to know whether South African parties as parties drive politicization, or whether individual politicians do so. The systematic analysis of the electoral manifestos reveals that parties as organizations do not politicize much against immigrants and immigration. In this sense, we cannot find evidence for this supposedly perverse upshot of the post-apartheid nation-building project where parties would politicize against immigrants to bolster internal cohesion: not parties as formal organizations. From other research and the media we know, though, that individual politicians certainly play a role in politicizing immigration in South Africa.

Ruedin, Didier. 2019. ‘South African Parties Hardly Politicise Immigration in Their Electoral Manifestos’. Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies 46 (1). https://doi.org/10.1080/02589346.2019.1608713.

Ruedin, Didier. 2019. ‘Attitudes to Immigrants in South Africa: Personality and Vulnerability’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 45 (7): 1108–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2018.1428086.

Ruedin, Didier, and Laura Morales. 2018. ‘Estimating Party Positions on Immigration: Assessing the Reliability and Validity of Different Methods’. Party Politics OnlineFirst. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068817713122.