Growth of Anti-Immigrant Parties in Western Europe

Author: 
Year:
Pages:248
ISBN:0-7734-7269-X
978-0-7734-7269-3
Price:$179.95 + shipping
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The book explains the rise in support for parties in Western Europe with a strongly anti-immigrant stance during the early 1990s. Using extensive multi-level data analysis that combines individual and party opinion data with aggregate statistics from a total of fourteen Western European nations, it concludes that support comes from a combination of ‘overt’ racists who articulate a highly unapologetic form of racism, and ‘covert’ racists who attempt to hide their racism in practical arguments about immigrants' deleterious socio-economic effects..

“. . . makes a useful contribution to the study of anti-immigrant political parties as well as to the study of how certain attitudes might motivate political behavior. . . . The implications here are important: culturally rooted prejudice is difficult to address with public policies and constitutes a greater destabilizing force than does economic opposition to the presence of immigrants. . . . many parties and many Western European nations are examined. This cross-national focus - with attention to country-specific variation – makes the tests of the hypotheses more rigorous than if they had been tested with data from a single country.” – Patricia A. Hurley

Reviews

“The findings and conclusions are particularly well written, and convey not only the substance but also the importance of those conclusions. The book is based on a good mix of case material and larger-n analyses. . . . .The literature review is extensive, appropriate, and up to date. The alternative theoretical approaches are well compiled and summarized. . . . An excellent piece of research! And finally, the conclusions are VERY important. Any academic – regardless of field – who is seriously interested in the topic of immigration politics should consider this book to be ‘must reading’.” – Robert Harmel

Table of Contents

Table of contents:
Preface
Introduction: The Growth of Anti-immigration Parties
1. The National Context
2. Explaining Anti-immigrant Parties
3. The Parties’ Opposition to Immigrants
4. The Publics’ Opposition to Immigrants
5. The Environmental Correlates of Anti-immigrant Voting
6. Conclusion: Overt and Covert Racism
Epilogue; Appendices; Bibliography; Index

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