15:30 - 17:45
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Bernd Schlipphak
Discussant/s:
Kerim Kavakli
Meeting Room F

Gabriele Spilker, Lena Schaffer
Free Movement in the Shadow of the Referendum: The Impact of Culture, Context and Competition on People’s Immigration Preferences

Samuel Johnston
Choose Your Target Wisely: Explaining the Variation in Nationalist Appeals in Contemporary Europe

Théoda Woeffray, Fabio Wasserfallen
European identities and migration preferences

Alexander Kustov
Testing the Backlash Argument: Voter Responses to Pro-immigration Reforms
Choose Your Target Wisely: Explaining the Variation in Nationalist Appeals in Contemporary Europe
Samuel Johnston
Trinity College Dublin

Nationalism has resurged across Europe since the 1980s, with a dramatic rise in the number of parties utilising nationalist appeals, and experiencing electoral success as a result. However, nationalism has multiple forms, and parties face strategic choices about how to combine them. Two prominent forms of nationalism are ethnoregionalism and cultural protectionism, where the latter includes anti-immigration and anti-ethnic minority appeals. Nationalist parties can combine these two forms in a variety of ways, but I argue that the European Union (EU) systematically incentivises these parties to prioritise ethnoregionalism instead of cultural protectionism. In particular, two key reforms of EU governance reforms have incentivised nationalist parties to prioritise ethnoregionalism: greater regional access to EU policy-making after the Maastricht Treaty came into force in 1993; and the fundamental reform of structural funding in 1988. Thus, both EU membership after 1993 and higher levels of EU funding are hypothesised to increase the relative saliency of ethnoregionalism for nationalist parties, especially in highly regionalised countries. These hypotheses are examined through a quantitative analysis of party manifestos across 33 European countries from 1980 until now. This analysis demonstrates that the interaction between EU membership and regionalisation has a significant and substantively large effect on the relative saliency of ethnoregionalism, but structural funding has no significant effect on ethnoregionalism’s relative saliency.