Tag: immigrants

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New publication: Responsiveness of local politicians to Immigrants does not vary systematically by voting rights

I’m happy to announce a new publication on how responsive local politicians are to queries by immigrants, and whether the fact that immigrants can vote in some places affects this. We draw on the fact that voting rights vary by region, and use two small field experiments to measure responsiveness. In the end, we find no evidence that local politicians are more responsive to immigrants in municipalities where immigrants have the right to vote.

To understand why, we also carried out a small survey — a small number of observations is unfortunately a ‘feature’ of this publication, largely because the population under study is limited. In the survey, the local politicians state that there are not strongly motivated by re-election, so their behaviour may well be different to politicians at the national level where re-election prospects are often more important.

Nicholson, Mike, and Didier Ruedin. 2023. ‘Responsiveness of Local Politicians to Immigrants Does Not Vary Systematically by Voting Rights’. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies Online First. https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2023.2211027.

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The Sociology of Migration in Switzerland: Past, Present and Future

The editorial to our special issue is now available on Sciendo! The introduction to the special issue reflects on the knowledge production in the sociology of migration. We emphasise the continuous and changing challenges of knowledge production in the sociology of migration, taking a historical perspective to outline how contemporary contributions are a development of previous work. We observe an unprecedented willingness by researchers to challenge earlier perceptions of “immigrants” as a homogenous population, – something largely banished to populist political discourse these days. We identify contributions to the reflexive turn, but also and increasing focus on specific social phenomena and the dedication to finding solutions to societal challenges such as inequality or social cohesion.

Chimienti, Milena, Claudio Bolzman, and Didier Ruedin. 2021. ‘The Sociology of Migration in Switzerland: Past, Present and Future’. Swiss Journal of Sociology. 47(1):1-20. doi:10.2478/sjs-2021-0004 [Open Access]

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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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Why automated coding of party positions from manifestos may produce misleading conclusions in political research: Paper now in print

I am happy to announce that a paper co-written with Laura Morales is now available in print at Party Politics. We use different methods to extract party positions from party manifestos and compare them. The focus is on immigration and immigrant integration as topics with varying salience, and we find that automated coding does not lead to consistent estimates. We provide first investigations as to when automated methods (do not) work well to obtain party positions from party manifestos, and suggest ‘checklists’ as an efficient manual method that may be suited in many research applications — one that I have recently validated to work in a non-EuropeanWestern context.

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. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068817713122.

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.