CONF : Riccardo Turati, ”Are Immigrants more Left-Leaning than Natives?”, IELMS, 13 avril 2022, 12h45-13h45

Riccardo Turati, Maître de confé­rence au dépar­te­ment d’économie appli­quée de l’Universitat Auto­noma de Barce­lona et Fellow Inter­na­tional du dépar­te­ment Dyna­mics de l’ICM parti­ci­pera au sémi­naire Inter­na­tional Econo­mics and Labor Markets Seminar (IELMS) du CES de Paris 1 le mercredi 13 avril 2022, 12h45-13h45, Salle 116, MSE, 112 Boule­vard de l’Hôpital.
Maître de confé­rence au dépar­te­ment d’économie appli­quée de l’Universitat Auto­noma de Barcelona

Titre : Are Immi­grants more Left-Leaning than Natives ? co-authored with Simone Mori­coni, Giovanni Peri

We analyze whether second gene­ra­tion immi­grants converge in their poli­tical prefe­rences to those of the host country’s citi­zens. Using data on indi­vi­dual voting beha­vior in 22 Euro­pean coun­tries between 2001 and 2017 we charac­te­rize each vote on a left-right scale using ideo­lo­gical and policy posi­tion of the party voted from the Mani­festo Project Data­base. We first charac­te­rize the vote of second gene­ra­tion migrants and we show a signi­fi­cant left-leaning posi­tion rela­tive to obser­va­tio­nally iden­tical natives. We than show that poli­tical prefe­rences of second gene­ra­tion migrants assi­mi­late towards those of natives, but remain signi­fi­cantly more left leaning due to a combi­na­tion of cultural trans­mis­sion, selec­tion and simply sharing the expe­rience of being migrants. This posi­tion derives from the combi­na­tion of stronger prefe­rences for govern­ment inter­ven­tion, dispa­ri­ties reduc­tion poli­cies and more open and inclu­sive social prefe­rences. Simu­la­tions based on the esti­mated coef­fi­cients suggest that, on average, the rise of second gene­ra­tion immi­grant popu­la­tion would have a mild, albeit not negli­gible, effect on the elec­to­rate of most Western Euro­pean countries.