09-19-2016, 02:46 PM
Compelling long article from Vox, it's got little to do with economics or other factors, it's resentment against loss of status by immigration:
Quote:III. It’s the xenophobia, stupidWhite riot - Vox
Far-right party platforms differ from country to country, including on major social issues like feminism and economic issues like the size of the welfare state. The one issue every single one agrees on is hostility to immigration, particularly when the immigrants are nonwhite and Muslim.
"What unites the radical right is their focus on immigration," Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, a professor at the University of Bergen in Norway who studies the far right, told me in a recent interview. The widespread popular unease about those migrants is a key source of their appeal.
Start with the timing. The 1980s were a critical time for European immigration. It’s when immigrant families came over in large numbers, rather than just the guest workers who had been allowed under previous laws. That brought white Europeans in contact with nonwhite, heavily Muslim immigrant populations for the first time.
"Until then, they [the immigrants] were mostly secluded; it was mostly men who worked in factories, all together, and [lived] quite close to where they worked. When the families came over, they started to move into residential areas, working-class areas in particular," Cas Mudde, a University of Georgia scholar, told me. "That was one of the key developments [for the far right] — the visibility of multiculturalism, which was not addressed by the mainstream parties."
A 2012 paper by a group of Swiss and Austrian researchers found direct support for this hypothesis. After poring through decades of local demographic statistics from across Austria, they found that the increase in support for the country’s leading far-right party was strongly correlated with a community’s increase in immigrant population.
"Our results suggest that voters worry about a changing ethnic and cultural composition in their neighborhoods and schools," they write.
Ivarsflaten’s research came to similar conclusions. In a 2008 paper, she looked at data on vote shares for seven European far-right parties, to try to figure out why people voted for them. She found that a person’s support for restricting immigration was "close to a perfect predictor" of one’s likelihood of voting for a far-right party.
By contrast, people’s views on other political questions — like economics or trust in government — didn’t have nearly the same predictive value. You can see this in the following chart from her paper. The Y-axis is the probability of voting for a far-right party; the X-axis is the level of support for restrictive immigration policies, right-wing economic views, and the like. The difference between immigration policy preferences and the others is striking:
"This study therefore to a large extent settles the debate about which grievances unite all populist right parties," Ivarsflaten concluded. "The answer is the grievances arising from Europe’s ongoing immigration crisis."
Eight years later, after running tests on newer data for a forthcoming paper, Ivarsflaten believes the thesis still holds.
Now, the fact that immigration is the leading driver of the far right’s rise doesn’t explain why Europeans resent immigrants so much. Luckily, scholars have also looked at that question. What they found was fairly conclusive: European whites believe that immigration poses a threat to "traditional" European culture.
They express the exact kind of grievances that Petersen’s "resentment" theory would predict: a sense of anger at the social order being overturned by immigrants, particularly those from Muslim countries.
George Washington University’s John Sides and UC Berkeley’s Jack Citrin combed through data on 20 European countries, a sample of 38,339 individual people, to see what best predicted negative attitudes toward immigrants.
Economic factors didn’t seem to matter much. They found little association between the national unemployment level and the prevalence of negative attitudes toward immigration, or an individual’s income and their likelihood of holding such attitudes.
But when they tested measures of cultural resentment — people’s evaluations of statements like, "It is better for a country if almost everyone shares the same customs and traditions" — the results were very different. White European Christians opposed to multiculturalism were overwhelmingly more likely to be immigration skeptics.
When you get into the details, the link between anti-immigrant sentiment and cultural anxiety becomes even clearer.
A group of Belgian researchers examined support for their own country’s far-right party, Vlaams Blok, at the municipal and national levels. Instead of just looking at the impact of the presence of "immigrants" in a particular area, they looked at different types of immigrants.
Specifically, they separated out immigrants from Turkey and Africa’s Muslim-majority Maghreb region, which includes such countries as Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. They found that the presence of Muslim immigrants correlated well with increased support for Vlaams Blok, but the presence of non-Muslim immigrant populations didn’t.
"It is not so much the presence of foreigners, but rather the fear of the Islamic way of living that leads to extreme right voting," they write.
What happened in Europe is straightforward: An unprecedented wave of nonwhite, heavily Muslim immigration made many European whites uneasy. Le Pen, Haider, Fortuyn, and the rest developed a mode of politics designed to weaponize this backlash — to take inchoate anti-immigrant sentiment and turn it into votes through heated nationalist and anti-Islam rhetoric.
If that sounds like the rhetoric of Campaign 2016, it should.