An image of Marine Le Pen at a podium in front of a rallying crowd.
Marine Le Pen at a meeting of the National Front in 2012. Blandine Le Cain / Flickr.

Anti-Immigrant Political Parties Are Varied and Evolving, New Data Shows

By Will Merrow

Data Journalism Independent Study

December 13, 2020

In the last few years, the Republican Party's stance on immigration has aligned with far-right parties like Marine Le Pen’s National Front, according to new research which tracks parties’ positions over time.

With President Trump’s takeover in 2016, Republicans' immigration positions moved sharply to the right. Over the same time period, Le Pen’s party, which has roots in Holocaust denial and islamophobia, moderated some of its positions, and as of 2019 actually scored to the left of Republicans on immigration.

As a way to quantify where political parties stand on policy issues, researchers at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden have created a dataset from the assessments of hundreds of country experts, allowing comparison of political parties from around the world.

Looking just at parties in the largest countries in Western Europe - France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom - we can see that both Republicans and Democrats are right of center in their immigration views.

Republicans are among the most far right, although fringe parties in Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain have more extreme views.

The main issue driving right wing parties' support is immigration, according to political science research. It has been the defining issue of Le Pen's party, and she has called for "putting a stop" to it, targeting lower-income countries in particular. In Trump's speech announcing his run for president, it was his remark that Mexico is "bringing drugs, crime, and rapists" along with calls for a border wall that most defined his candidacy.

Looking at the most far-right parties in these countries, the Republicans and the Conservatives in the UK were the most successful in the last elections, while the other parties failed to break 20 percent of the vote (the data goes up to 2019, so does not include the 2020 election in the U.S.)

These small vote shares are nonetheless significant, as the parliamentary systems in Europe mean they still translate into seats in the legislature or a role in a coalition government. In 2017, Le Pen lost the French presidential election, but not before forcing a one-on-one runoff against the ultimate winner, Emmanuel Macron.

The shifts in recent years are significant. In this graphic, filled dots    show parties' positions in the most recent election, and white dots    show positions in previous elections going back to 2012.

The Republican Party has exhibited the largest change in its immigration views, moving far to the right. Le Pen’s National Front and the Alternative for Germany both moved somewhat left, while the Conservatives moved right and then tacked left.

On the economy, the parties’ views are varied. Here, a more right-leaning score means supporting privatization, lower taxes, and and lower spending. There is less movement than on immigration, and the Republican Party's score on economic issues is unchanged since 2012.

Immigration may be the defining issue for these parties and a main reason for their voters’ support, but they have also enacted major economic changes, such as the UK's Conservatives pushing through Brexit, and Republican’s 2017 tax legislation which lowered taxes for corporations and wealthy Americans in particular.

The dataset also includes parties’ support for democratic norms, based on metrics such as tolerance of political violence and respect for opponents. The numbers are ominous: five of the eight parties have become more authoritarian, and none have become more democratic.

The Republicans and Conservatives show dramatic shifts, having moved significantly towards the authoritarian end of the scale. Some have remained more committed to democracy, such as the anti-immigrant Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, but most are outside the norm.

But just how far outside the norm are they?

To answer this question, we can compare them with the other parties...

...and see that the anti-immigration parties are almost alone in their authoritarian tendencies. Nearly every party that leans authoritarian also leans right on immigration.

Notably, the data is as of 2019, so doesn’t yet reflect the Republican Party’s unfounded claims of voter fraud and other anti-democratic behavior in 2020. With the U.S. election concluded, the next battles over immigration and democracy will be in Europe.

Data source: The V-Party dataset from the Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.