The forthcoming article “The electoral politics of immigration and crime” by Jeyhun Alizade is summarized by the author below.
Immigration is one of the key issues shaping European politics in the last decades. A particular concern among voters is that it worsens crime problems. Despite the immigration-crime issue’s prominence in public debates and elite rhetoric, there have been comparatively few studies on its political consequences. Most of the literature on the electoral implications of immigration focuses on how (perceptions of) its cultural and economic consequences shape voting behavior and electoral outcomes.
Drawing on European Social Survey data, my article shows that fear of immigrant crime is less ideologically polarized than other immigration-related concerns. Unlike cultural or economic anxieties about immigration, which tend to divide voters along predictable partisan lines, safety-related concerns cut across party boundaries as well as educational and geographic divides, which usually polarize electorates on immigration.
The article introduces the idea of a voter-party mismatch: while Green and other progressive parties often avoid addressing crime among immigrants due to ideological and organizational constraints, many of their supporters express worries about immigrant crime. As a result, the mismatch can push progressive voters—particularly urban, educated ‘cosmopolitans’—toward center-right parties, which are more likely to problematize immigrant crime and push for law-and-order policies.
Empirical evidence from Germany supports this claim. In panel data and in a candidate-choice conjoint experiment, progressive voters concerned about immigrant crime are significantly more likely to switch their support to the center right, especially when the latter adopts stricter positions on issues like deportation of criminal foreigners relative to progressive parties. Notably, this shift does not appear to depend on whether the center-right simultaneously stigmatizes immigrants or adopts conservative socio-cultural positions—suggesting that basic safety threat can outweigh other ideological commitments among progressives.
Overall, my article shows that repercussions of immigration can in fact drive leftist cosmopolitans—usually perceived to be staunch supporters of immigration—to the right. As such, the article qualifies existing theories of electoral cleavages in contemporary knowledge economies, which posit a growing left-right divide on immigration due an educational re-alignment of voters.
About the author: Jeyhun Alizade is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Migration, Integration, Transnationalization research unit at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Their research “The electoral politics of immigration and crime” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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