In person icon Political Parties and International Immigration

Abstract

This panel addresses the relationship between political parties and immigration policy (management of inflows, integration and citizenship policies) as well as the effects of this social phenomenon on party politics. There is a widespread debate in social sciences on whether political parties matter and immigration has not been excluded from this discussion (Mair, 2008). Yet, there are an insufficient number of academic studies to explore the linkage between parties and immigration policy. Two main justifications have been associated with this shortcoming in political literature: first, most of the developed studies related with immigration have a quantitative character, which privilege a structural approach to understand political outcomes and seldom include an examination of the agency of political parties. Secondly, research on party politics and immigration policy analysts have been developed autonomously enhancing insularity between these two strands of political science, which contributes for the lack of clarity on the role of political parties. These trends foster the absence of in-depth research on the influence of political parties over immigration policy and on public attitudes towards this social phenomenon. Consequently, this panel seeks to provide an invaluable opportunity for a cross-disciplinary dialogue and invites panel proposals on the consequences of migration for party politics, as well as the mutual and intertwined effects of party politics on immigration control, integration and citizenship policies. Thereby, this panel will seek to overcome ‘subdisciplinary parochialism’ and to provide a venue for the interchange between specialists on political parties and on politics of immigration with the aim to draw future lines of research. Lastly, this panel should be of great interest to scholars of politics of international migration, comparative and party politics, European politics as well as populism and extremism.

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