Visibility and votes: A spatial analysis of anti-immigrant voting in Sweden

Abstract

The mechanisms by which negative attitudes toward immigrants become votes for anti-immigrant parties are not fully understood. Yet, voting for political parties with anti-immigrant platforms is arguably the most common expression of these sentiments in Europe. I use anti-immigrant attitudes as a starting point and hypothesize that superficial intergroup contact, or immigrant ‘visibility’, brings these attitudes to the fore as politically salient. A spatial analysis of electoral data from each polling station in Sweden for the 2010 parliamentary election (n= 5,688) provides support for the hypothesis. Much of the variance in district-level voting can be accounted for by the percent of non-western residents in adjacent neighborhoods. The findings suggest that the probability of anti-immigrant attitudes translating into votes increases in neighborhoods where residents are likely to have fleeting contact with immigrants and I test this further with a city-level case study. I collected observational data on the visibility of non-westerners in a mid-size Swedish city and find that votes for the Sweden Democrats are above the national average where immigrants are most visible. Furthermore, the effect of non-western residents on anti-immigrant voting is most pronounced in regions without histories of significant non-western immigration, suggesting that the negative effects of superficial contact diminish over time.

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