Do Enfranchised Immigrants Affect Politicians' Behaviour?
Abstract
Immigrants are a large and growing unenfranchised group across many developed countries. Does immigrants' enfranchisement affect how politicians respond to immigration? I study the unique UK context, where immigrants from Ireland and the Commonwealth have voting rights in all elections immediately upon arrival, but these rights are not accorded to other immigrants. I analyse how politicians discuss immigration using text analysis of the universe of speeches in the UK parliament and how MPs vote on immigration bills between 1972 and 2011. I use a shift-share instrument exploiting pre-existing settlement patterns to address immigrants' endogenous location choice. I find that politicians exposed to higher enfranchised immigration spend more time in the parliament discussing issues that affect immigrants positively, yet they vote to increase immigration restrictions. Enfranchisement leads to more political engagement of immigrants, and politicians respond to this engagement. The political cost of favouring enfranchised immigrants is compensated by restricting future immigration.
About this workshop
The Public Governance workshop is an online seminar series focused on state of art research in political economy that uses non-traditional data and data-intensive methods.
The workshop gives a platform for the research on the role of governance in designing and developing better policies. Key features are the political environment, the role of the media, the engagement of stakeholders such as civil society and firms, the market structure and level of competition, and the independence of public regulators, among others. Particular emphasis is placed on research with NLP methods due to the proven usefulness of transforming text into data for further econometric analysis.
Periodicity: Mondays from 17h30 to 19h.