Democratic elections and anti-immigration attitudes

Abstract Democratic elections are ritualized and institutionalized processes that allow for the peaceful resolution of political disagreements and conflicts. However, electoral processes also serve as focal points in which right-wing political parties can adopt a negative (or xenophobic) discourse against immigrants and other minority groups in order to obtain political benefits (i.e. more electoral support). Left-wing parties are often better off abandoning the immigration issue and focusing on other policy areas during the campaign. As a result, anti-immigration narratives become more prominent during periods of election salience. In this article, we take advantage of the timing of the cross-national post-election surveys included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) to explore the effects of election salience on individuals’ anti-immigration attitudes. We find that immigration attitudes become more polarized just after an election has taken place. On the one hand, right-wing respondents exhibit more negative attitudes toward immigrants when the election is salient, but those negative views decrease as we move away from the election. On the other hand, left-wing respondents express lower levels of xenophobia immediately after the election, but their immigration views become more negative as time since the election increases. Surprisingly, these effects are only detectable in contexts where the immigration issue is less salient.