Immigration Threat, Partisanship, and Democratic Citizenship: Evidence from the US, UK, and Germany

• Author: Sara Wallace Goodman
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Date: 01 September 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0010414021997165
• Subject Matter: Articles

2021, Vol. 54(11) 2052 –2083

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414021997165

Comparative Political Studies

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414021997165

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Article

Immigration Threat,

Partisanship, and

Democratic Citizenship:

Evidence from the US,

UK, and Germany

Sara Wallace Goodman1

Abstract

Politicians and media frequently invoke immigration threats to shape public

opinion. But how do outgroup threat frames affect norms of citizenship,

including behavior, liberal value commitments, and national belonging? This

paper presents evidence from an embedded vignette survey experiment in

three immigrant-receiving societies: United States, United Kingdom, and

Germany. I find immigration threats are filtered through partisanship in

polarized settings, and asymmetrically affect norms of “good citizenship”

among individuals on the partisan left. However, we see variation within

this group: Democrats (US) de-value norms of behavior, like voting and

being informed, while Labor supports (UK) repudiate liberal norms like

tolerance and rally around national belonging. By contrast, in Germany, we

observe more consensus in citizenship norm responses. The strong effect

of immigration threat framing on the partisan left brings our attention to

the strategic use of immigration discourse to move traditionally sympathetic

citizens away from democratic civic ideals.

Keywords

immigration, citizenship, democracy, norms, crisis

1University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Sara Wallace Goodman, University of California, 3151 SSPB, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.

Email: s.goodman@uci.edu

997165

CPSXXX10.1177/0010414021997165Comparative Political StudiesGoodman

research-article

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Introduction

Politicians and media frequently invoke immigration as a national threat. In

the US, President Trump characterized an “asylum caravan” as an “invasion”

in the runup to the November 2018 midterm elections, even deploying US

troops to the southern border to confront a threat that never materialized.

Likewise, in the UK, one of the more visceral adverts during the 2016 EU

Referendum (“Brexit”) campaign was Nigel Farage’s Leave campaign poster

of Syrian refugees, walking through European countryside, overlaid with red

font reading “Breaking Point: The EU has failed us all.” As immigration con-

tinues to be a core political issue in Europe (Ford & Jennings, 2020) and

beyond, these types of threat narratives proliferate across the political spec-

trum (Dancygier & Margalit, 2019; Helbling, 2014), though mainstream left

parties traditionally adopt more positive positions on immigration than cen-

trist and right-wing parties (Carvalho & Ruedin, 2018).

There is a significant body of work that shows immigration narratives are

effective in eliciting a wide variety of attitudes (Hainmueller & Hopkins,

2014) and emotions (Albertson & Gadarian, 2015; Brader et al., 2008a;

Dinesen et al., 2016), as well as policy (Goldstein & Peters, 2014; Hellwig &

Sinno, 2017) and voting preferences (Lubbers & Coenders, 2017). Generally

speaking, citizens are responsive to immigration information (Van Hauwaert

& English, 2019), and changing the valence or frame of that information

(e.g., culture vs. economic threat; immigrant profiles) can alter attitudes and

policy preferences, such as intake levels (Ford & Mellon, 2020) and views on

integration (Sobolewska et al., 2017). And since immigration is generally

perceived as a type of group threat (Riek et al., 2006), there is evidence that

the nature of this outgroup threat stems specifically from cultural, not eco-

nomic considerations (Dancygier & Donnelly, 2013; Hainmueller & Hiscox,

2010). And here we see broad consensus that immigration threat produces

responses that favor sociocultural aspects of ingroup identity, like proficiency

in a national language or feeling patriotic (Bonikowski, 2016; Schildkraut,

2005, 2014; Theiss-Morse, 2009; Wright, 2011).

Much of this work is thematically internal—for example, studying the

effects of immigration on immigration attitudes—or looks at a subset of

sociocultural characteristics about the ingroup, like language or religion. But

the question of who “we” are, that is, the attributes and norms of the ingroup

of citizens, extends beyond cultural markers. In a democracy, citizens rarely

think about what it means to be a “good citizen” as linguistic proficiency or

other arbitrary criteria. Rather, as Dalton (2008a, p. 78) defines, norms of

citizenship comprise “a shared set of expectations about the citizen’s role in

politics.” These include behavior and value commitments or beliefs about

2054 Comparative Political Studies 54(11)

Goodman 3

community, solidarity, and liberal democratic norms—like abiding by the

rule of law and equality. Existing work tells us a lot about how ordinary citi-

zens define norms of citizenship (Bolzendahl & Coffé, 2013; Dalton, 2008a),

but we know little about how these definitions are challenged or affected by

threat, specifically that of an outgroup. What does an immigration threat do

to ordinary citizens? Does threat change their definition of civic obligation,

that is, what their role as “citizen” should be in hard times?

This paper studies the effects of immigration threat on democratic citizen-

ship norms. If presented with information about an immigration threat, do

ordinary citizens embrace liberal democratic principles or do they veer

toward intolerance and other illiberal norms? Do “good citizens” embrace

diversity or hunker down and rally around attributes of national belonging?

And do certain subsets of citizens respond differently? What role does parti-

sanship play in filtering threat perception? Do only certain partisans view

immigration as threatening?

To answer these questions, I embedded a preregistered, vignette experi-

ment in original national surveys, fielded in the summer of 2019 in three

countries: the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. These cases

are all advanced democracies, therefore we might expect external threats to

have similar effects on a principally universal conception of norms of citi-

zenship. However, they provide useful leverage for a most different design,

to consider the role of partisanship across two- and multi-party systems.

The cases also exhibit three different immigrant-receiving histories—the

US a “classical” immigration country, the UK a former colonial, post-

WWII receiver and Germany, a country that accepted over one million asy-

lum seekers in 2015 but, despite decades of guest worker settlement,

continued to describe itself as “not a country of immigration” up until the

Residence Act of 2004.1 These historical narratives may not only affect

how individuals perceive immigration threat but also how immigration is

engrained as threatening (or not) to norms of citizenship including and

beyond norms of belonging.

I find overall that information about an immigration threat leads individu-

als to change norms of citizenship. Moreover, different patterns emerge when

we look directly at partisanship. The largest effects appear on the partisan

left. In the US, we see decreased support for behavioral dimensions of good

citizenship among Democrats, like the importance of voting and understand-

ing politics. In the UK, we see increased illiberalism and national belonging

among Labor supporters. By contrast, German respondents exhibit less parti-

sanship, where norms of citizenship—like understanding politics—are acti-

vated across the political spectrum. The substance of these responses varies

across case, but the pattern is significant. Immigration threat affects the