The imagined connection: the role of radical right parties in connecting crime and immigration

The rise of anti-immigration populism in recent years is one of the biggest challenges of democracies. My dissertation asks two overarching questions related to this challenge. First, does the large number of immigrant population really cause native-born residents to show anti-immigration attitudes? Second, why are people saying that they are threatened by immigrants even though most of them have never faced any tangible threats from immigrants? To answer these questions, the current study focuses on the role of radical right parties in formulating an imagined connection between safety threat and immigration.

Using data from European and the U.S. public opinion surveys and information on local contexts, I examine how radical right parties mobilize anti-immigration attitudes not only for their supporters but also for general public. In the first empirical chapter with European national-level data, I find that vote shares of radical right parties in the latest elections can increase the nation’s overall level of anti-immigration attitudes, and perception of safety threat is also affected by the political power of radical right parties, regardless of the size of immigrant population and actual crime rates. Similarly, in the second chapter with Germany data in 2018, I find that states with higher vote shares of the radical right party in the latest election show greater anti-immigration attitudes. Neither state-level immigrant density nor crime rate shows discernible effects on anti-immigration attitudes if the radical right party is weak. Lastly, in the chapter with the U.S. data in 2017 and 2018, I find that even non-Trump voters in the 2016 election are more likely to have anti-immigration attitudes if those voters are living in states with higher vote shares of Donald Trump.