Bridging Worlds: Political Parties and International Migration

International migration has had a wide range of political impacts both on the host societies and on origin countries. The development of international migration changed the composition of the national electorates, transformed the traditional party constituencies and forced political parties to elaborate their stances towards this social phenomenon within their electoral platforms and subsequently address it in government. At the same time, the extent, nature and impact of migration has been simultaneously moderated by immigration, integration and citizenship policies of the host societies. Since immigration policy is a prerogative of national parliaments and executives led by political parties, there is a strong dynamic relationship between party politics, electoral competition, parliamentary representation and immigration flows, limits and integration policies. We want to go beyond discussing immigration policy as a depoliticised process on the one hand, and beyond treating immigration as a driving cause behind extreme right parties on the other. Instead, we invite panels to address the issues of how inter-party or intra-party competition and policy making on immigration are interlinked. We acknowledge that the policy making and electoral competition aspects of immigration are rarely discussed together, as ‘the political science communities working on asylum and immigration, on the one hand, and parties, on the other, have traditionally sat at separate tables.’ (Bale, 2008). Our proposed section will invite them to speak to each other in order to prevent sub disciplinary parochialism. This section seeks to provide an invaluable opportunity for a cross-disciplinary dialogue and invites panel proposals on the consequences of migration for party politics from immigration studies, comparative politics and public policy perspectives. We also welcome panels that address the mutual and intertwined effects of party politics on immigration control, integration and citizenship policies. We invite the panels to openly tackle the seemingly opposing incentives facing political parties to attract new electorates, appease anti-immigrant public and design effective immigration policies in a changing world. We will consider panels focussing on single, especially European, countries, but encourage international comparison whenever possible. This section welcomes panels that fit within its overall objectives and address either the impact of immigration on political parties and party systems as well as the effects of political parties on the shape of national immigration policies. To promote open dialogue, we wanted to keep some panel slots open for a competitive call for proposals. As a result, this section proposal contains only three pre-organised panels. The first proposal entitled: ‘Party reactions to immigration in new destination countries’ was presented by Dr. Laura Morales (University of Leicester). This session will explore empirical papers on any aspect of how political parties have reacted to the sudden socio-demographic changes in new destination countries and the varying pressures of different sectors of the public opinion. Postgraduate students Virginia Ros Albaladejo (University of Manchester) and Michalis Moutselos (Princeton University) presented another proposal to form a panel entitled: ‘Electorate’s attitudes towards immigration in Europe: individual and contextual determinants’. This panel explores changes in electorates’ attitudes towards immigration in European countries over time and under the effect of a serious economic crisis. A third proposal, by the Section chairs, is for a roundtable discussion to analyse a political process whose study is still on ‘its infancy’, i.e. the impact of extreme-right parties on immigration policy. This panel aims to provide a venue for the interchange between specialists on this party family and on migration politics and therefore will be co-organised with ECPR Extremism and Democracy standing group to promote its interdisciplinary character.