ANTI-IMMIGRANT PARTY SUCCESS - The insider-outsider divide and the role of labour market policies and institutions in 19 countries

Abstract

The structure of the labour market in industrialized economies has changed during the last decades. There has been an increase in atypical employment, such as limited contracts. This development has resulted in a dualization of the labour market between permanent workers, insiders, and temporary workers, outsiders. Some argue that this has implications for political behaviour and that the insider-outsider divide constitute new groups for political mobilization. Alongside with the changes on the labour market have new types of parties’ emerged, anti-immigrant parties. New evidence suggest that labour market policies and institution can mitigate the success of anti-immigrant parties, because it compensates for the cost and risk of unemployment. This thesis aim to investigate the relationship between the insider-outsider divide, voting for anti-immigrant parties and the role of labour market policies and institutions. By conducting several multilevel logistic regressions, this thesis show that there is no significant association between type of contract and voting for anti-immigrant parties. There are some evidence of an association between labour market policies and institutions and voting for anti-immigrant parties. Contrary to what expected theoretically, the higher spending on active labour market policies in a country, the higher probability to vote for anti-immigrant parties. No interaction effect is found: being an outsider or insider does not affect voting for anti-immigrant parties differently depending on the design of labour market policies in a country.