Why don’t all immigrants support progressive parties with pro-immigration policies? Korinna O. Lindemann and António Valentim present new evidence suggesting this puzzle can be explained by the features of the countries where people migrated from.
Immigrants are often assumed to be natural allies of progressive politics. Yet this is not always the case. In the United States, for example, first-generation Cuban immigrants have long leaned Republican, often linked to communist experiences before migration. In Europe, too, recent studies have shown that some immigrant voters support parties with anti-immigration platforms.
This raises an important question: why do progressive parties fail to attract equal support from all immigrant groups? We examine this puzzle through the case of Green parties in Western and Northern Europe.
Green parties are among the most progressive political actors on immigration and citizenship, so if immigrant voters were mainly guided by those issues, the Greens should be especially attractive. Yet we find that immigrants do not support them equally. As Figure 1 shows, immigrants who grew up in established democracies are more likely to support Green parties than immigrants who grew up in authoritarian or post-authoritarian regimes.
Figure 1: Gap in Green party identification
Note: The figure shows differences in proportion of green party identification when comparing first-generation immigrants regardless of immigration age from established democracies and immigrants from (post-)authoritarian regimes across Western and Northern European countries.
Our argument is that political preferences do not begin from scratch after migration. People carry with them habits, issue priorities and political values from the political environment in which they were socialised. Those early experiences help explain why some immigrants support progressive parties more than others.
Testing support for Green parties
Green parties are a useful test case because they combine two features that are especially relevant for immigrants. First, they tend to be liberal on immigration and citizenship. Second, they are strongly associated with environmental issues and a broader set of post-materialist issues, such as gender equality or LGBTQ+ rights.
The first feature should, in principle, make Greens attractive to immigrants. But the second means that support for Green parties depends on more than immigration policy alone. Our central claim is that immigrants from established democracies are more likely to support Green parties because they were socialised in contexts where environmental issues were more politically salient, and the conditions in those regimes allowed them to develop more post-materialist values.
Immigrants from authoritarian or post-authoritarian regimes, on the other hand, are less likely to have encountered these issues as major political divides during their formative years and to have developed those values. This distinction challenges the tendency to think of immigrants as one group that behaves politically alike. Rather than seeing immigrant voters as a single bloc with similar preferences, it suggests that they are influenced by the regimes they were socialised in.
To test this argument, we analyse data from multiple rounds of the European Social Survey combined with information from V-Dem. We compare first-generation immigrants living in Western and Northern Europe, distinguishing between those who grew up in countries that had been established democracies since 1946 and those who came from countries that had not. We focus on people who migrated as adults, so that they spent their formative years in their country of origin.
Figure 2: Results of the analysis
Note: The figure shows the effect of coming from an established democratic vs. (post-)authoritarian country on green party identification.
We use entropy balancing to make these two groups comparable on a range of characteristics before using an ordinary least squares regression to estimate the difference between origin-country regime type and support for Green parties. The main result shows that immigrants from established democracies are more likely to support Green parties than immigrants from authoritarian and post-authoritarian regimes.
The importance of political socialisation
Why would regime background matter? We suggest two mechanisms. The first is salience. Established democracies have historically paid more political attention to environmental issues. Green parties emerged in Western Europe alongside (and often from) social movements focused on ecology, peace, women’s rights and other post-materialist concerns.
In many authoritarian or post-authoritarian settings, by contrast, politics has been more dominated by economic insecurity, regime conflict or questions of survival and order. Environmental issues were thus less likely to be salient political issues when this group of immigrants was growing up.
The second is values. A long tradition of research argues that post-materialist values are more likely to emerge in secure and prosperous contexts, where citizens can focus less on economic and physical survival and more on self-expression, quality of life or environmental protection.
Following this logic, one could expect that people socialised in established democracies (relative to those who grew up in (post-)authoritarian regimes) should be more likely to develop the kinds of values and issues that Green parties tend to focus on.
Figure 3: Salience plot for climate change in established democracies and (post-)authoritarian countries
Note: The plot displays country average percentages of people who choose each of the response options in Leiserowitz et al. (2022), as well as the confidence intervals. Countries are classified using the Regimes of the World indicator (Lührmann et al., 2018; Coppedge et al., 2024).
We find evidence consistent with this. Using data from surveys and UN speeches, we show in Figure 3 that established democracies devote significantly more attention to environmental issues. We also find that immigrants from established democracies are, on average, more progressive on several other post-materialist issues than those from (post-)authoritarian regimes.
Early experiences of travel across borders
One of the most interesting implications of our study is that migration does not fully erase political socialisation in the origin country. Even after moving to new contexts and different institutions, immigrants continue to be influenced by contexts they were socialised in.
This might help explain why progressive parties cannot assume that pro-immigration positions alone will secure immigrant support. Parties may be progressive on immigration yet still fail to attract these voters if their broader issue profile does not connect to their political priorities.
These findings matter for different reasons. They show that origin-country institutions should play a more central role in the study of immigrant political behaviour, and that the institutions and context one is socialised in can have long-term consequences. Moreover, they suggest that outreach to immigrant communities cannot rely on broad assumptions about their experiences or shared interests.
For more information, see the authors’ accompanying study in Political Science Research and Methods.
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics.
Image credit: Radu Razvan provided by Shutterstock.
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