Turning round the telescope. Centre-right parties and immigration and integration policy in Europe1
By Tim Bale. 2008
214 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Because those who study migration do not focus much on parties, while those who study parties tend to focus on migration only insofar as it affects electoral competition and positioning, the role of political parties in immigration control and integration policy is underestimated. Parties on the centre-right, which have enjoyed nowhere near the attention devoted to their more radical counterparts, are particularly important and interesting in this respect. They make up many European governments and therefore help to determine state and EU policy. Maintaining their ownership of the issues involved makes electoral sense but their policies on control and integration are not purely, or at least primarily, a strategic response to the populist radical right; even before the rise of the latter, immigration and integration were matters of genuine ideological and practical concern for Europe's market liberal, conservative and Christian Democratic parties. Too hard a line, however, risks alienating their supporters in business and in civil society. It is a difficult balance, but one that makes a big difference both to the parties involved and the public policies they help to produce.
Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f8e08eff21081cfa07ec0eec08ff22a12d0642e7
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In Political Science and International Relations
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Comparing Radical Right Parties in Government: Immigration and Integration Policies in Nine Countries (1996–2010) (2012, background): “Christian Democrats, for instance, often also value charity and hospitality as part of a socialconservative tradition, even though this may be more manifest at the grassroots level than at the level of the party leadership (Bale 2008; Van Kersbergen and Krouwel 2008).”