ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳

Events

The Cross-Pressured Legislator: Trading-Off Issue Dimensions in EU Immigration Policy

Hosted by the European Institute

Zoom or CBG.1.07

Speakers

Professor Natascha Zaun

Professor Natascha Zaun

Dr Miriam Sorace

Dr Miriam Sorace

Chair

Professor Sara Hobolt

Professor Sara Hobolt

Do anti-immigration and anti-EU positions go hand-in-hand when it comes to adopt legislation?

We argue that immigration and EU integration are qualitatively different dimensions, and shape legislative behaviour differently. We first explore the purported link between anti-immigration and anti-EU contents via supervised quantitative scaling of 111 legislative texts from the EU immigration acquis. We find no link between immigration restrictiveness and national sovereignty provisions, and this is true pre and post-2015 crisis, and under various other measures of economic and migration pressure. We then investigate EP roll call voting data on the dossiers - as well as ParlGov, CHES and Eurobarometer data - covering over 350 national parties and spanning two decades. We find that political parties readily trade-off their position on the EU dimension, while the immigration dimension is less `tradeable'. This is importan