Search

By reaching a vote share of 12.6 percent in the 2017 federal election, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) ended Germany's rare status as a Western European polity lacking a significant Populist Radical Right Party (PRRP). Some of this support comes from a group not usually expected to vote for PRRPs: immigrant-origin voters. Recent survey data shows high levels of support for the AfD especially within the group of Russian-Germans – immigrants from the former Soviet Union and its successor states. What motivates these immigrant-origin voters to support an anti-immigrant party? This article argues that support for the AfD – besides immigration-related preferences – can be best explained by their levels of assimilation or incorporation for different domains regarding the mainstream German society. Especially low levels of economic and social integration, and in particular a strong ethnic identity, relate positively to favouring the German radical right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigrants now constitute a sizeable and rapidly growing group among many Western countries' electorates, but analyses of their party preferences remain limited. Theoretically, immigrants' party preferences might be explained with both standard electoral theories and immigrant-specific approaches. In this article, we rigorously test both perspectives against each other using the most recent data from Germany. Applying the Michigan model, with its three central explanatory variables – party identification, issue orientations and candidate evaluations – to the party preferences of immigrant-origin and native voters, we find that this standard model can explain both groups well. In contrast, we find no direct effects of the most prominent immigrant-specific variables, and neither do these meaningfully moderate the Michigan variables. However, we find strong formative effects on the presence of political attitudes and beliefs: immigrants with a longer time spent in Germany, a stronger German identity and less experience of discrimination report significantly fewer item non-responses for the Michigan model's main explanatory variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the Immigrant German Election Study (IMGES) as the first survey that explicitly targeted immigrant-origin voters in Germany. IMGES fills the gap of insufficient data in the field of immigrant-origin voters with a combination of proven and novel survey measures of the electoral behavior of people with a background from either Türkiye or from the former Soviet Union or its successor states. The study was carried out in a post-election, cross-sectional survey in 2017. Its compatibility with the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), the Ethnic Minority British Election Study (EMBES), and the Dutch Ethnic Minority Election Study (DEMES) allows for in-depth comparative analyses between immigrant-origin voters and natives across different countries. In addition to standard measures of electoral behavior, the data include measures of immigrant-specific factors relevant to voting behavior. Moreover, the dataset is not limited to voting behavior in Germany, it also includes transnational voting behavior in the respective countries of origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]